Growing up I slept under quilts made by my grandmother &/or my mother. My mother made many of my clothes and I learned to do the same as a teenager. Loved Home Ec. in high school and majored in it in college. Was going to be a Home Ec teacher until I did my student teaching in an overcrowded school where I had 45 minutes per day in a classroom with 30 students and 8 sewing machines and only one girl in the class that gave a care about sewing.
One of my projects in high school was finishing a state flower quilt my mom had started for her hope chest. It had the designs of the flowers printed on muslin, which were to be colored with crayons, heat set by ironing between sheets of waxed paper, then embellished with embroidery stitching. My mom and her sister had finished about 1/2 - 2/3 of the flowers. I did the rest (great fun by the way), added green sashing and put it all together on the sewing machine. Then we found someone (a friend's grandmother) to do the hand quilting.
When I got married my MIL gave us a lovely hand-pieced, hand-quilted grandmother's flower garden quilt. I couldn't imagine doing all those tiny little hexagons by hand. At that point in my life, if it couldn't be done by machine I didn't want to do it and I was like many others who just couldn't see why you would take all the time to cut all those little bitty pieces out and put them all together...make clothes for everybody, you bet, but a quilt...not me! Did that once (high school project) and it was a pain to put together.
Did all kinds of crafts, mostly crocheting, knitting and counted cross stitch, with a few others thrown in for variety over the years.
A few years ago I had gotten burned out on cross-stitch and crocheting and didn't really want to do any more knitting either. My best friend, an avid crafter as well, had taken up beading, but that did not interest me. We had both talked about someday taking up quilting but that was as far as it ever got. Then another friend inherited a huge amount of fabric from her dad's stepmother and was selling it in order to have money for a project she wanted to do. Of course I couldn't pass that up and I bought a whole bunch of that fabric. Then I needed a birthday present for her daughter and decided that now was the time to make a quilt with some of that fabric as a keepsake for the little girl. So I just plunged ahead, letting the design of fabrics dictate the cutting of the pieces (a couple of them had strips of flowers with lines between) and proceeded to sit down and hand piece the blocks since my sewing machine was being cranky at the time. Got it done by a couple of weeks after her birthday. She loved it, everybody loved it...As they say, the rest is history!