My first quilt

Last night I was bored aka waiting for the news to come on, so I uploaded my old quilt pictures to webshots. I thought I might give you a virtual quilt show of the quilts I've made since I began quilting. Many of you have know me since July 07 when I started blogging about my quilting experiences, but I started quilting long before that!
I started sewing 20 years ago... I know it was a long time ago in my books at the ripe old age of 8! I was in 4-H and my mom was one of the leaders. She taught me how to sew on an old Singer Genie - probably the machine she'd had since college. It was that putred yellow color and she no longer has it - thank goodness! I sewed mostly clothes for myself, lots of dresses, and my favorite - a prom dress for my junior prom. Quilting wasn't big back then. Mom taught me so much even though I was the procrastinator and was sewing the night before county fair or fashion revue.
I didn't sew a whole lot in high school, just my required 3 projects for fair each year. I was too busy in Volleyball, FHA, 4-H, annual staff, oral interp, one act play, band, chorus, cheerleading, and a gazillion other activities. I was from a small town where there was one high school and 60 students in my class and we were the largest class! Everyone was involved in everything they were interested in.
After high school I went to SDSU. I was home on Native American Day holiday weekend (that's the SD holiday instead of Columbus Day) my first time home from college and I decided I had way too many t-shirts and I wanted to preserve them. I decided to make a quilt. I thought it would be easy, just cut them up and sew them together. Boy was I ever wrong! Mom and I found a purple flannel and got a lot of it. Yes I loved purple clear back then! I made the shirts into rows and sewed one sashing strip between them. I cut the shirts down to different size rows and it really has no direction or organization whatsoever. There are little pieces of the sleeve that were written on, so I put fabric around them, so they could be added in. There are little front squares from t-shirts. I can tell what each of them mean to this day, but it's so not very well done. First off I shouldn't have used flannel. It weighs a ton! The purple is great, but the plaid not so much. I had so many shirts that it's a king size. I didn't even know what quilting meant then, so I sewed around the edge, burped it, and then put a decorative stitching around the edge. I took it to Grandma's house and mom and her helped me tie the poor thing. It's tied with yarn. I didn't finish it until the summer after my freshman year of college. I worked on it on all the holiday breaks - Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and Spring break. I ened up using it a ton in college as I folded it in half and it fit perfectly on my twin bed throughout college and kept me warm in Brookings. In the dead of winter I still pull it out as it's very heavy and warm.





I will always remember this as my start into quilting, but my next two projects are what I consider as the times I really truly started quilting. Ten years later I'm still quilting, but have taken it to the next level. I'm still glad I have this to remember my quilting experience.