Something to show

One step foreword, two steps back. I set out to make a quilt for my baby girl a few weeks ago, and realized I had much to learn before I should set out to design and execute my own quilt, having no prior experience. So, on wise counsel, I found a few quilt block patterns and pieced them together as practice. It took me ages to pick fabric, cut all the pieces, and piece it all together, but after much ado, I have a little something to show for my efforts in this new little hobby. Here are my first finished quilt projects:

Chicago Geese

Four-Four Time

As you can see, they are hardly perfect. I'm glad I did some practice pieces before diving into a more important project. I have some room for growth in choosing fabrics, sewing triangles so that all the corners are sharp, sewing straight lines, and I'm sure many other areas. But I also learned some good lessons. It was a fun challenge to figure out the order in which to piece things together. I think my corners got better over time. And chain-stitching [piecing several of the same cut together without in one line of stitching] was a fun skill I picked up from a book and applied during this process - it sure made things go faster! 

Rolling Pinwheel

Diamond Cross

I found these quilt block patterns for free online. While I can't seem to re-find the website I got them from, I do have a pdf if anyone is interested, so let me know your and I'll be happy to send it to you if you'd like to give some of these a try as well. 

At the same time that I've been getting into this actual sewing, I've been checking out a few books on quilting. For my baby, I want to make a quilt that illustrates where she's come from and represents the amazing people with diverse gifts and traits that have been invested into her genes. I found a book called Create Your Family Quilt by Barbara Brackman. It has you use state quilt blocks and symbols to compose a quilt design that represents your geographic history. It seemed like a fun approach to the idea of honoring our family's past, so I played around with a few design options using this program  that comes on a CD with the book. 

My weakness of indecisiveness and struggling to make a clear dominant piece in a design really comes through on the first quilt design:

Road from Pennsylvania to Maine

Despite this design's chaos, it does manage to represent what I know about my maternal line to present and even into the future - my grandmother's great-grandfather originating in Pennsylvania; moving to Ohio, where he was a professor; moving his kids to a Texas ranch after his wife passed; then my move out to California and our pending journey to Maine. There are blocks and motifs representing each of those states. It is sort of interesting to me that my great-great-great grandfather and I book-end 5 generations that stay put in Texas, to cover territory in several states. He sounds like such an interesting man, to go from being a professor, becoming a widower, and then moving his kids to a big open piece of land in foreign territory to raise his kids alone - what a drastic transformation. 

I got much simpler and manageable with the other two designs, perhaps still beyond my ambition or courage to actually attempt as a real live quilt, but fun to put together and experiment with:

I loved being able to incorporate bluebonnets [TX state flower] into a design. I was also excited to find block designs for pine trees, which apparently represent Maine, but bring back fond memories of the forests on my grandfather's ranch when I was growing up - they beautifully tie together my past and my future.