Quilting with the Dread Pirate Rodgers! aarrggghhh!: September 2018

Wow ... the pressure is on! Benita of Victoriana Quilt Designs invited me to participate in her September 2018 "Quilter's Meet -n- Greet" ! This is very exciting because you, the reader, will have a fantastic opportunity to read about and visit the blogs of all sorts of quilters. Click on the high-lighted Meet-n-Greet link to visit all the blogs of great, participating quilters!

Benita is also having a contest with the Meet-n-Greet to encourage all of you to visit the participating blogs! You can check out the amazing prizes available here or just click on the picture to the right/

I was tickled pink! Except that ... seeing as I have not been part of such an event before .. what do I write about? Well, apparently, this introduction post is supposed to be just that .. and intro to me and my quilting. Goodness gracious .. I can talk for HOURS about that topic! (yeah .. just ask my family!) :-)

So, where to start? The Good Fairy of the Wizard of Oz suggested to Dorothy that is it is always best to start at the beginning .. so I shall do so.

First .. welcome! I'm so pleased that you are here!

In the dim recesses of my memory, I have mental pictures of one of the first quilts I made. It was circa 1970's and I made a strip quilt for the brother of my older brother's girlfriend (who he later married). It was VERY simple, as my skills were VERY basic at that time. It turned out to be a usable quilt and I was pleased with it. Unfortunately, I have no pictures.

In the ensuing years, I did less quilting but MEGA amounts of garment sewing for myself and needlework. In 1979-ish, I was married and moved into a new-to-us house. At that time, I was subscribing to Family Circle magazine and they had an article to buy a kit which would enable to you to "make a quilt in a weekend".

one of my first quilts

Oh, stop laughing! I *believed* them. They wouldn't publish something that wasn't true, would they? Well, I bought the quilt and one Friday afternoon, upon arriving home from work, I informed my new husband that I was going to be sewing all weekend and please don't interrupt or bother me. I had a quilt to make. Little did he realize this would be a scenario repeated ad naseum over the life of our marriage (now at 39 years!). Poor him. :-)

That quilt was a quilt as you go, Log Cabin. King size. Why a king size quilt? Well, we had a king sized bed!!! And you know what? **I FINISHED THAT QUILT** by the end of Sunday evening. It was pieced, quilted together and bound. I had no doubt that I would accomplish the task because .. well .. the magazine SAID that I could make it in a weekend. :-)

I actually have a blog post about that quilt and you can read about the details here.

I made a *few* quilts after that but then we started a family and I returned to my garment-sewing roots and began years and years and years of making gorgeous, adorable garments for our three daughters. Dang, I gotta say that they were the best dressed little girls in town.

But, around middle school, they decided they wanted to look more like the other girls .. fair enough .. and I greatly reduced my garment sewing .. but resumed my quilting. It was in 2000 that we did a fairly major remodel on our house that knocked down the old, non-functional back porch and rebuilt it into a 10'x20' sewing studio for me (with an adjacent office for my home business .... when I closed that business about 15 years later, I converted that office space into my paper crafting hobby room. No space is ever wasted!)

It was at that time .. 2000 .. that I realized that making quilts was FAR EASIER than making garments! Dang .. no bodily curves to accommodate! And quilts never get out grown! Woo hoo! I began quilting With A Vengeance. From then, I have never stopped.

I made quilts for us, for the girls, for relatives, for gifts, for events, for no reason at all other than I liked the layout. And I started collecting fabric suitable for quilting. (DO NOT mention to my husband that I STILL have fabric for garments ... he doesn't quite understand the difference in fabric types!). I now have a lovely inventory of quilting fabrics but never quite seem to have THE fabric necessary for any particular project. How on earth is that possible? (rhetorical question!)

I started with geometric patterns because they were the easiest to conceptualize. Over the years, I have taken classes (both online and physical). I have expanded my skills to the point where I think I have done just about every technique .. or at least it certainly seems that way.

After not liking hand applique at all, I learned a technique from Nancy Lee Chong of Pacific Rim Quilting Company, that made me an absolute gushing Fan Girl of her technique and patterns. Now, I will happily and contentedly do needleturn applique at the drop of a hat.

I started my concept of a Forever Project™ ... this is a long-term project that doesn't have a fixed finish date. It gets worked on when I get around to it. My first Forever Project was a hand embroidered throw pillow of a sitting unicorn. It was for my oldest daughter (who was born in 1983). It took me 10 years to finish that *small* throw pillow because I kept putting it away! Sadly, I don't have a picture of it. But it eventually got done and I needed something else to do.

hand stitched Cathedral Window

My second Forever Project™ was a hand stitched Cathedral Window. I had found some fabric of my Mom's (who had passed away in 1989) and I felt very emotional and sentimental about it. There wasn't a whole lot but I made some Cathedral Window blocks and made them the center focal point of a quilt. It took me 7 years before I decided that it was "big enough".

After that, I had a fairly flexible mindset about Forever Project™ quilts. Some were small, some were large. Some took no time at all, some took years.

But always, they are projects that are hand work .. something portable .. something that I could work on in doctor's office waiting rooms, in the car on road trips, on vacations while away from my sewing machine. And they never, ever, ever had a firm finish date. When they got done, they got done.

I think I've done about a dozen ???? or so Forever Projects™ thus far. They just never seem to end. :-)

I love sewing. I LOVE quilting. Like every other quilter I know, I have far more potential projects, UFOs, WIPs and inventory for projects than I will use in my lifetime. But that doesn't stop me because I'M NOT A QUITTER!! :-)

Lone Star with applique

You might be wondering about the dramatic lone star and applique quilt by my link on Victoriana Quilt Designs. *That* quilt was a delight to make. Although the basic design is a Lone Star, the whole thing is an original design (with inspiration from a Ricky Tim's quilt) that had its ups and downs during construction. The fabrics are hand-dyes and absolutely seem to *glow*. It remains one of my favorites. (and *one of these days*, I'll even get around to posting the gallery web page about it!)

I do have a web site which is a gallery of my quilts. I started the web site as an online scrapbook of sorts to remind me what I had created and what I was thinking during that project. Of late, I've been quite the lamer about keeping it up to date but seeing as I am feeling more energized about returning to blogging ... then my web site gallery must need to be updated as well! And so I shall. My quilting-specific part of my web site is The Dread Pirate Rodgers Quilting Projects. The main site can be found at The Dread Pirate Rodgers Home Page.

Don't forget to visit all the other quilter participants of the Victoriana Quilt Designs Meet -n- Greet!