How I Got Into Quilting

         My mom used to take my grandma and Ms. Smith to town to shop and eat out . Grandma's my dad's mom and Ms. Smith's my uncle's mother in law. Got that ? It entailed dragging old ladies from store to store , helping with car doors , canes ,grocery carts, loading the trunk, and then taking them to eat . Yes, My momma's a saint . Seriously ! Ms. Smith was the quilt maker from Tenn. . Grandma wanted to make one . Mom and I decided that we would like to give it a try . 

      We would go to my uncle's house and we started with a simple strawberry quilt . Our background blocks were TORN from a white sheet . Oh yes , old school baby . We had to go fabric hunting with them to get just the right size polka dot for that strawberry and the just right green for the tops . Needless to say it was torture but we managed to hunt and gather the thread for the blanket stitch or buttonhole stitch and had our work cut out for us . 

Strawberry quilt

We did blanket stitch around the red polka dot and then the top green .

tion

I hand quilted this in all four corners . 

The border design .

The back without the flash so you can see it .

The label , I wrote it in a red ink and that faded so bad . I went back and redid with a black pigma pen .

And I actually still have the CRAP I tied it with ! LOL 

        After we made the top , we tied  it with oh whatchamacallit , CRAP ! Ms. Smith wanted us to use a white sheet for the back but I showed up with blaring red . She wasn't impressed that I wasn't following her guidelines. I wasn't happy with the few ties in my wonderful strawberry quilt . I decide to hand quilt around the blocks . At the time , it was truly a nightmare . The blocks were out of a sheet and that is super hard to quilt through . I managed but it's not pretty . I took a class at Quilter's Confectionery to learn how to hand quilt . I had this quilt appraised years ago and was shocked that she said 550.00 . This is how I jumped into the world of quilting . I started reading everything I got my hands on and went to shops and asked lots of dumb questions. We had a rough start but so grateful that Ms. Smith took the time to teach us what she knew. Without her , what would I be doing and thinking and obsessing over if not my fabrics , patterns and UFOS !