When I hit age 24, I decided that I wanted to set some goals for myself. One of those goals was to sew a quilt. I had never pieced a quilt before and I didn't have the slightest idea where to even begin. So, the goal sat untouched for four more years. The year I turned 28 I finally decided it was time for me to piece a quilt. I called my sister (who is very good at this type of thing) and asked if she could help me. We went to the fabric store in October of 2005 and picked out all the fabric I wanted to use. Then we sat down at her house with two quilting magazines and tried to figure out what kind of quilt I wanted to make. Then she helped me cut the fabric. I went home feeling very excited about this challenge. I knew it wouldn't be easy for me considering I had never done anything like it before, so I gave myself a deadline I thought I could work in: two years. Seems like an awfully long time, I know, but with having a busy single life, I knew I couldn't set an unrealistic deadline of say, six months. It just would never get done that fast and I didn't want to discourage myself right away. So, two years it was.
I actually got quite a bit done in the first six months. I had nearly 15 of the 30 blocks done. But then things slowed down dramatically. I slowly worked on it for the next year and got all the blocks done. Then this past December I called my sister again and she helped me sew the rows together. With only the border left to finish, I went to her house again this past Monday and we worked on it.
The quilt is not without it's flaws. I wasn't very exact in my sewing and some of my seams were wider than 1/4". Because of this, the rows of blocks were hard to sew together and the sashing had to be perfectly measured to each individual block. It took longer than it should have. It doesn't completely line up, but when looking at the quilt as a whole, it is hard to notice those flaws.
I am so glad to finally be done! Well, I still have to quilt and bind it, but that wasn't included in my original two year plan. So now I just have to figure out how to do that and hopefully it won't take another two years!
2 comments:
I think I remember when you started your quilt. It looks so, so good! Way to go!
Kinda makes me want to start one of my own...
I must say, the pictures don't do it justice. I was even better seeing it in person. I loved how you started out your post, "when I was 24..." It's kind of like "four score and seven years ago..."
So, when's your next project??
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