Great thread!
I learned to appreciate quilts from my Mom. She took classes in the 1960s from Jean Ray Laury, who also lived in our hometown. Mom made appliqué pieces and stichery after those classes. She finally made a quilt in the early 1980s; it was log cabin quilt using Eleanor Burns Quilt in Day book. My Mom had no feeling for geometry and struggled with piecing that Log Cabin ( made with strips of torn fabric!). She hand quilted it and gifted it to my cousin as a wedding gift, but never got a thank you.
Around the same time, I took a class at a local quilt shop that called for making cardboard templates and tracing them onto fabric using a ball point pen. Never finished that project (but still have those instructions somewhere).
My next project was based on a postcard of one of Laury’s quilts. I started making it with fabric from sheets. Another project that I never finished (but still have stuffed in a closet).
I finally finished a quilt from a panel in the 1990s. It was a baby quilt and the quilting was fairly bad (who knew that there were batting’s made of something other than thick polyester or such a thing as a walking foot?). But I got better with each project by reading books, taking classes and joining a guild. When my grandmother retired, I gave her the advice and support she needed to finish and hand quilt a grandmother’s flower garden quilt she started in the early 1930’s before she married. My Mom inherited that quilt but I inherited the scraps, including pieces of her sister’s pajamas that she used in the top.