Are you a beginning quilter?

Had this post in my mind for a while ...for all those beginning quilters that look over the internet coming across all those wonderful quilts. I did not blog when I started quilting and I would imagine that looking around  the net could become quite intimidating and to some extent discouraging when you are a beginning quilter.

Therefore I thought I share my very first quilt with the world...warts and all. It a simple sampler quilt that I put together following instructions of a tutorial for beginners by Gloria Massard from Sew A Quilt on the internet. Now this is several years ago but the basic information is still there. This is how I learned quilting. The original tutorial had 6, 6in blocks...a Log cabin, Four patch, Flying Geese, Rail Fence, Diamond in a Square and Pinwheel block.

I got so enthused about it all that I just kept going and made it into a little quilt.

The end product looks alright from afar and I remember how proud I was (and still am) that I accomplished this. As you can see, already then I preferred the solid type of fabric.

Now let's take a closer look:

The Log Cabin block was somewhat hard and turned out seriously crooked...too many pieces involved

 I loved the simple Four Patch

 This was the first block I made and I was hooked

 The Pinwheel block had a big knob  in the middle where all the seams meet...in fact, there is a bit of a hole there.

 Flying Geese block

Diamond in the Square block...this was hard and from memory, I don't think it ended up 6"...but, hey, it looked great.

Actually, none of the blocks turned out at exactly 6 ".  I then put some sashing in between which did not really line up properly, but this probably helped to even it all out a bit as the whole quilt turned out reasonably straight.
 
Left the best for last...my stitching in-the-ditch was an adventure, to say the least. I used beige thread as this was what I had read in magazines about. Did not realise at that point that you could buy invisible thread and it also did not occur to me to use something maybe a bit less obvious. Still remember being quite perplexed about reading that  the quilting in-the-ditch would literally disappear in the ditch. Well, mine definitely did not, ha, ha...

So, hope you can see we don't all start with those amazing works of art, but from experience I can honestly say that each subsequent quilt obviously became more accurate and my workmanship  improved over time...it does not actually take very long at all to get the hang of it.

Happy quilting

Karin