love these stories...ok, here comes mine. My mother always sewed but didn't have the patience to teach me. Her mother, my little gma, sewed, but lived a bit away, but visited about every 6 months. When I was about ten my gma was visiting and helped me make a simple cotton top. I was hooked on sewing and used most of my babysitting money on fabrics. My mother soon learned that if she let me use her machine I would make my clothes and she didn't have to buy them.
When my kids were little I guessed how to make two simple baby quilts and then somewhere down the road made a full queen size quilt in huge pastel squares and white eyelet embroidery fabric. I had been given a huge amount of this tan ? fabric...wasn't just cotton, but it worked ok for a backing. Since I had never seen anyone quilt or seen a magazine or anything, I must have sewn the backing to a used blanket in a huge asterik and then tied the quilt top to both. My kids loved it and one time took to a church sleep in and got many compliments.
Since I loved to make clothes, toys, etc. that satisfied any curiosity I had about quilts for a long time. All I had ever seen was patchwork quilts that didn't have any particular design or anything to them and they just didn't interest me enough to want to make one.
Then a few years ago, my father's mother started telling me about teaching at a senior citizen's group and they were making a fall wall hanging and all the ladies were handmaking a quilt to raffle off.
She is immensely talented, but lives across the country from me. I did get curious though and picked up a quilting magazine and found out that the world of quilt is an amazing place of colors, textures, designs, and once i realized that since you use small pieces to make the blocks, that meant you had to buy a lot of different colors of fabric. Well I had always loved fabric, but you bought one kind for one outfit...oh, this was going to be FUN!!! I thought I was going to get one book and read it and turn out quilts like the lucy episode where she was working in a factory and the candy just kept a coming!!!!
So, i went crazy buying everything in site and got seriously out of control until I got very sick and couldn't sew for over a year. Now hubby is disabled and we have to be careful, but I would say I owe the itch to my family, but my grandma n. pushed me to scratch it. I still sew other things sometimes, but my love, my passion is all about quilting now. It's like finding your way home and you didn't even know you were lost. :wink: