My First Quilt

Bonnie is having a First Quilts Linky Party!

Before I started my first "real" quilt, I did this. I can't tell you what I was thinking, other than that I'd read how to make squares in triangles and wanted to give it a try. It was a looong time before it got finished into a baby quilt. I think a big chunk of the binding still needs to be stitched down.



I do know what I was thinking when I started this one.



I'd been watching Fons and Porter's Love of Quilting on PBS and fallen in love with the split nine patch. But I was afraid of the triangles, so I did the whole thing with three inch squares. I think the layout I used came from a library book with different ideas for log cabin quilts.

The fabric is a combination of thrift store scraps and red tag clearance fabrics from Joann's. Half of the binding is cotton left over from a shirt I made in high school home economics. The muslin is the least expensive stuff I could find at Joann's using a coupon.



At the time I started playing with these blocks, I was still completely obsessed with knitting, so I made them a couple at a time, whenever the mood struck. It was a long time before I had the blocks all done -- by the time I laid them out on the floor and assembled the top, we were living in the new house and I'd had another baby. By the time I quilted it, my mother (who I don't think had started quilting when I started the project) had her longarm...did I mention that finishing this quilt took a while? And I'd started blocks for a bunch of other quilts that still aren't finished. There was the monkey quilt for Alex, and Dot to Dot, and my rail fence, which I wound up giving away to my best friend. And not long after that was the first of the log cabin quilts. It really feels like I've been doing this more than four or five years!