Idle hands are the devil´s playthings.

Click on any of the thumbnails to see the full size photo. File sizes for each full size photo are listed at the end of the description or beneath each thumbnail.

My First Finished Quilt

78 K42 K
This is my very first finished quilt. Notice how I worded that? I´ve probably started half a dozen quilts in my life, but was never able to finish one because I could never get the completed squares to actually fit together. But thanks to the invention of the rotary cutters and self-healing cutting mats, I was finally able to cut all the pieces to the right size and that was all I needed to be able to actually finish a quilt. I made this during a very hot August about four years ago. It was too hot to be in the garden and I was on vacation for the month, and there is no way I could spend a month doing nothing. Actually, I have trouble spending a day doing nothing, so I just stayed in where it was air conditioned and made a quilt.

Photographing this quilt has turned out to be one of the hardest pictures I´ve taken so far. No matter how I tried, I couldn´t get far enough away from it to get a good picture. Stretching the quilt across the couch (left) showed up the colors better, but it was impossible to get the whole quilt into the picture with it on my queen size bed (right).

Card Trick is my most favorite square in this quilt. I love optical illusions so this patch was the first one I chose from the book that I bought to teach myself this craft. I knew the minute I saw it that it would be a part of this quilt. (45 K)

 This is my second favorite square because I love the way the flowers in light pink fabric harmonize with the pink flowers in the blue fabric. If I had known more about quilting when I made these squares, I would have cut each blue triangle so that the large flowers were centered. This one is called Churn Dash because it looks like the blades on the end of the "stick" that you pumped up and down in an old-fashioned butter churn. That "stick" is called the churn dash, hence the name of the patch. (I am old enough to know what a butter churn looks like, and even how to use one, but I didn´t know that´s what it was called, until I looked it up. I hate not knowing stuff like that.) (40 K)

 This one is called Ohio Star and it turned out to be a lot easier to make than I thought it was going to be. It could probably have a little more contrast, but I was starting to worry that the quilt was going to be too busy, so I started toning things down a bit with this one. (41 K)

By the time I got to choosing this square, I thought I should try something with much smaller pieces, just to see how hard I could make things for myself. So I decided to make a Nine Patch square that actually included four smaller Nine Patch squares within it. The finished size of the smallest square is 1-1/8 inches. It was actually fun working with those tiny pieces and sewing carefully to make sure that all the intersections matched. (40 K)

These are my favorite fabrics in the quilt. I really had no idea that selecting fabric for a quilt was so critical in determining whether the finished quilt really looks good or not. I wonder sometimes about some of my choices, but I´m happy enough with it that it´s never seen the inside of a closet since it was first put on my bed.

31 K 19 K

I´m not sure why I chose this green fabric for the border, except that it had the appropriate shade of burgundy in the flowers, and the quilt book said I needed a certain number of light, medium, and dark fabrics in my quilt. I´m still not sure that I like it, but oddly enough, it´s the fabric most people like best. Go figure.. (44 K)

The back of a quilt is usually just plain old cream-colored muslin, but that seemed so boring. And when I bought the fabric for the quilt, I really had no idea which colors would go where, so I bought way too much of every color, just in case. That meant I had lots of this fabric, since I´d only used it in the Card Trick patch, so I decided it would do just fine for the back. I intended that the quilt would be reversible, but I love the top so much that I´ve never turned it over. (72 K)

This is actually the part of quilting that makes it a quilt - the part where you sandwich the batting between the pieced top and the back and then stitch all the layers together. There are supposed to be about ten to twelve stitches per inches if you´re a good quilter, but I was lucky if I was able to keep a consistent six or eight stiches per inch on this first quilt. I´ve improved since then and can now keep to about nine or ten per inch, but it sure is tough on my arthritic fingers. Not tough enough to make me take up machine quilting though. (40 K)

The finishing touch on any quilt is to bind the edges. I think I was ten or twelve when my mother taught me how to do a blanket stitch, so I wasn´t about to do anything so mundane as to attach the binding of this quilt that way. I suppose I could have just used the same blind stitch I used to attach the binding to the quilt back, but I wanted something distinctive so I sewed these stars all the way around the edge. It took an entire day to sew them all, and someday I really am going to count them just to see how many there are. (64 K)

Turn the Page
 © 1997-2000 DJ James, All Rights Reserved.
Click here to send comments. 		Kodak DC120