My First Quilt

I saw this idea over at Patch Andi. It started at Simplify. You post a picture of your first quilt and your most recent and talk about what you learned.

My first quilt:

This was made for my grandparents’ 60th anniversary in 1998. My mother had started watching Simply Quilts because I was starting to quilt and decided that I should make a photo transfer quilt. It is laid out so that you start in the middle with a family photo and dates of my grandparents’ marriage. Then as you head out in different directions you get my aunt’s family, my uncle’s family, and our family with marriage dates and kids’ birth dates. I’d made some blocks for swaps before but this was my first all the way finished project. See those strips that I used to make all the pictures line up? They are cut 1.5 inches wide. That is insane. There’s one thing I learned from this quilt. Make things bigger!

I learned some other things too. My mother typed up all the family info. I noticed that she spelled my brother’s name wrong. I called her to mock her and then started looking very closely at the rest of the words to see if there were other errors. My aunt’s oldest child’s birth year seemed to be wrong. I called Mom back.

Mom: No that’s right.
Me: But that’s only 7 months after the wedding.
Mom: Yes it is.

(Pause to let me take that in. This is the very conservative Christian side of my family. Honestly, the possibility of that date being correct had never crossed my mind.)

Mom: She had a 9 pound baby and swears to this day that he was premature.
Me: Ok.
Mom: Don’t look too closely at Michelle’s birthday.
Me: (checking out the first born of my uncle) Oh. How do they explain that one?
Mom: He freely admits he knocked her up and then married her.
Me: Was I really born five years after you guys got married?
Mom: Yeah, I decided to do something original.

My last quilt:

I make so much stuff now that I had to go back in this blog to see what I actually had finished lately. This was the emergency baby quilt I made a few months ago. I’m probably the only person whose last quilt is much less interesting than the first!

What I learned from this one – don’t sit around listening to details of a pregnancy for nine months only to realize 3 days before the birth that you haven’t even considered a present!