My first Quilting project

Sometimes I feel like perhaps I'm a social crafter. I started quilting when I was pregnant with my first born and wanted to make some blankets for the baby. I made some easy quilts that didn't involve any piecing. It was during that time that I met a lady who made all her quilts by hand. She used to handle our print shop at the architecture firm and during her down time, she'd work on her piecing. She introduced me to the basics of quilting, then I went to a local shop to take a basics class and I was hooked, or so I thought…
Fast forward to Fall of 2014, when I picked up the pieces to continue making 'Grandma's fan' that I had started 10 years ago. By winter I had about a dozen of them ready but didn't know how to proceed. The process was slow going and I couldn't imagine the final piece anymore.

Well, that's when my mom came to the rescue as she always does. She was visiting and wanted to try quilting and showed me some pieces that were hung on display in the Library. There were modern pieces as well as traditional pieces with lots of inspiration and it struck me that I don't have to be tied to just one pattern, I can mix and match. 

The next thing, we were looking in my stash of fabrics for my mom to put together some basic squares. She used the same creamy white for the base fabric as the base for Grandma's fan and slowly there emerged a pattern.

Each night after the kids and my dad retired to bed, mom and I would pull out squares and play with different placements of pieces to make and give the quilt a final shape. We decided that it needs to be  a king size quilt (94"x106").

We condensed the more colorful pieces into a diagonal and filled in the opposite corner with mostly pastels and squares of various shades of white. As we worked on placements, we took tons of pictures because each day a new pattern was calling to us but we had to decide so we could make squares that were in line with the color scheme.

My mom sewed the blocks by hand so we could remember the placement and keep making progress.

My mom with the quilt

Here is what it looked like back in summer. There were still many squares that needed to be sewn by machine and so it waited while all our stuff was in storage.

It became our focal point in the living room decor in our temporary residence, while we waited.

I modified some squares, ran through machine over running stitches and now in the coming weeks my goal is to add a border and backing to this quilt top. I have never done that before and I don't have any crafting friends here in Sacramento to lean on like I could in Minnesota, so its likely that it will be a slow processes with plenty of meltdowns but hope to get to the other side of it…