Well, this should get a chuckle out of everyone...
My First Quilt...
In November of 1983, I found out I was pregnant. Excited as all young mothers to be are, I wanted to make something "Just for you" for my baby. As luck would have it, I went to a yard sale that next weekend. The lady had strips of POLYESTER material in the most beautiful pastel shades!!! I could not resist. She also had the softest rainbow shaded "couch throw" I'd ever felt... I bought it to.
At the time, I was a maid at the Rendezvous Inn in Panama City Beach, Florida. I knew absolutely NOTHING about quilting, nor did I know anyone that did. Everyday at work, I'd wonder how in the world I was going to turn all that beautiful material into a quilt...
One of the Canadian women that "lived" in the motel every winter did needlepoint... She was working on it one day when we went by to change her linens.
I thought, "I could do THAT to the top and that would hold it all together!!!"
From all of that, my daughter's quilt was born... It never crossed my mind to cut the fabric into squares. I took one of the strips of polyester (the kind that almost every woman had a "suit coat and pants" made out of at the time) and laid it across the crib so that it hung down far enough to hide the mattress, and cut it. From that strip, I cut all the rest of the material into matching strips and started sewing it together.
Naturally, or so it seemed to me, those seams were really bulky. How did I fix that? Well, I sewed each side of the seam down, that's how! So instead of one seam, the strips had three! (LOL)
When I got all that finished, it looked kind of plain to me... and I remembered the lady needlepointing. I didn't have any "real" embroidery patterns, so I decided to make some!
I found a gorgeous child's coloring book, bought some plain old carbon paper (after all these years, some of the tracing can still be seen) and traced a puppy, a jack-in-the-box, an owl, a kitten, and a squirrel on the top and started to sew.
I didn't know how to embroidery either, so I had to buy a needle BIG enough to put all that thread through the hole! I could NOT figure out HOW that lady made such tiny stitches with ALL THAT thread!
While "coloring with thread" the first picture I'd traced on, it crossed my mind that THAT sewing could be what held the top and back together!!! So, on the Second picture, the puppy I think, I pinned THE FOUR CORNERS (ONLY) together and started doing that way.
I can't tell you the number of needles I went through, nor the HUGE amounts of thread I wound up using....
When my daughter, Michelle Leigh Combs, was born, I added to the center of it her name, weight, time of birth, name of the hospital and her doctor's name.
She was born a little premature and had to stay in the hospital for a total of 9 days. Everyone there oohed and ahhhed over my quilt... no one ever told me that it was absolutely nothing like any quilt they'd ever seen before.
It did exactly what I wanted it to though. My daughter loved it more than the Charlie Brown character loved his. She's always kept it on her bed, and now that she has a daughter of her own, Lily loves to use Mommy's quilt to.
After all the years of HEAVY usage, it's stained and tattered. In my opinion, the older it gets the more beautiful it gets!!!
When I speak to her today, I think I'll tell her to bring it with her next time she comes to see me and I'll take a picture of it and her and share with you.
I suppose it exemplifies the term, "free-style" quilting.