The Quilting Affair

I have been enchanted by quilts ever since I went to the first Kutztown Folk Festival a couple of summers ago. I went there to see if I could find anything to learn how to spin since I was determined to find a way to start spinning without needing my parent's help to order a start spinning kit online. I came out with my first spindle, a bunch of fiber, and memories of fantastic quilts that were displayed for a quilting competition.

Ever since then I have been wanting to learn how to quilt.

A couple of weeks ago I discovered that my mom has always wanted to learn how to quilt as well. She was the one who rescued the quilting frame from my grandmother and inherited a box full of old fabric that my grandmother was going to use to make a quilt, but never got around to it. At my insistence, we went to a couple of craft stores and found a beginning quilting book as well as a selection of fabric that we agreed would be nice to make a couple of potholders out of.

The fabric had been sitting on our coffee table in the living room untouched because I have been intimidated by actually cutting the fabric. After all, if you make a mistake in knitting it is fairly easy to fix. Just take your project off of the needles and rip the project out, then you can start over. Cutting fabric is not like that. If you make a mistake while cutting you can't just make a do-over.

So, yesterday my mom helped me get over my fear of cutting fabric by making me cut out the first blocks of our potholders. Then she had to take a shot at our fancy rotary blade. The difficult part is over and now I finally can teach myself how to sew. We have enough fabric to make four potholders; two potholders for each of us. I am going to use the yellow fabric that my mom is cutting out for the backing of my potholders and she is going to use the green fabric with the autumn leaves to back her potholders.

I think I am going to hand sew my first potholder and then let mom show me how to use the sewing machine for the second potholder. Once we have the top piecing sewn together, we can progress to learning how to fill it with batting and cutting out the backing. Then it will be off to the quilting stage!