My Mom, World's Most Versatile Quilter

This past weekend I took the kids down to Tennessee to visit my parents and go to their county fair with them. The Wilson County Fair is in Lebanon, where they live, and it's even bigger than the state fair. Ginormous. We had a ton of fun eating fair food, admiring farm animals, seeing prize winning quilts, and other general fair-iness.

The next day we were generally wiped out and hung out at the house. This somehow led to my mom pulling out a bunch of old quilts and projects from when we were kids. I remember her doing a lot of quilting growing up, but I wasn't too interested and I didn't pick it up myself until just last year. But now, knowing how much goes into a quilt, I was blown away by her stuff. I was also so tickled by how much she was just like me and most other modern quilters when she started out.

1. She had a bunch of UFO's, even some she had long forgot about. Some were stacks of blocks and some were basted quilts, half quilted. Always more than one thing going on at once, which looked very familiar. 
2. She basically taught herself the skills. No one else in her family was into quilting so she just figured it out. Of course, she didn't have the internet's help, just plain old books.
3. She figured out how to be good at everything- appliqué, hand-quilting, curves, templates, all of it. Really, not much has changed about the way we do things. 

This was very exciting to find in the old cedar chest. She made this full-sized quilt for my bed when I was about 3. She said I was very into pink, but she rebelled a little by making the blocks mainly blue. The entire thing is hand quilted! She used this method they called lap quilting, which is basically just quilt-as-you-go but with hand stitching. She would use templates she made herself out of sandpaper to sketch the designs on before stitching. Amazing! And she let me take it home with me :)

This was the one I remember being on my parents' bed all growing up. I love the way she made each house block it's own color scheme and then used all the colors on the flying geese border. All hand-quilted again. I think people just didn't quilt on their home machines back then. 

This is the quilt top she just finished recently from Joel Dewberry's Heirloom collection. Despite being such an experienced quilter, she is not stuck in her ways at all. She loves all the new designer fabrics and she is gung-ho about learning how to become an awesome free-motion quilter on her machine. She even bought Angela Walters book, which was so fun to read through while I was there. She is now working on a quilt made from a jelly roll (first time using pre-cuts) and planning a very modern wall hanging (with no borders!) I love that she is always up for learning new things, even when she is already so talented and accomplished. Way to go mom. 

I also got to come home with these old hand pieced blocks that we think were made by my great-great-aunt's mother. I love the mismatched bright fabrics! I definitely need to find time to put these together someday.



So is your craft all in the family too? Or did you figure it out on your own? Makes me think about how fun it will be to teach Hendrix and Elsie someday... if they care to learn that is.