I’ve been around some amount of fiber arts my whole life. My mom is a quilter and has been for a long time, so she was always sewing on something. She taught me to sew long before I can remember and she owned a fabric store for a while, which we still visited a lot even after she sold it, so I spent a lot of time around fabric and buttons and sewing accouterments. I’m pretty sure I can attribute my love of buttons to this too. I still remember when we would go to the shop and I’d be bored so someone would take me back to the back room and give me this box of buttons to play with. I would happily sort them again and again, in many different ways, and always wished I could take those buttons home!
To get back on track, my mom’s hobby led me to making my first quilt when I was about 6 years old. I remember that I was bored, and my mom was in her work room, and I was annoying her, cause I was bored. So she handed me a piece of white fabric and a bunch of scraps, and told me to sew. So I sewed and sewed, and then put some buttons on it. And my mom put a backing on it for me, and voila! my first quilt. Which is named, aptly enough, the Button and Shape quilt. I’ve always been so creative with names, I’m sure you can tell. And here are pictures!
- That little frayed bit of fabric is a piece that was added on towards the end. It was a scrap that was laying around my mom’s work room and I was sitting there while she was doing something to put the quilt together, and I frayed out the bottom half of the scrap, and decided it was so pretty it had to go on the quilt. So I decided we should put it at the top so that everyone would know which side is the top. I don’t know why I thought that would be a problem but I was very certain that was how it should be done. Sometimes I’m amazed at the adorable thoughts I had when I was a kid, it’s like I’m remember a whole separate person sometimes.
- I wish the lighting were better, but this is the best I can do at the moment. It looks good from this distance, and in my memory it’s perfect, but when I got it out recently for the first time in a long time I realized just how young I was. The stitches are very large and some of the pieces are about ready to fall right off, but it will always be perfect in my head.
- This is me with the quilt after it won second prize in my age division of the quilt show. I was sooooo excited about that, and I’m still pretty proud of it too. You can even see that I’m holding it the right-way up because of the strip at the top ;-)!
- You can see the big stitches better here, but the real reason for the close up is that this is my favorite of the shapes on the quilt (the checkered one on the bottom right). Why do I have a favorite when they’re just shapes? It’s the fabric it’s made of. For some reason it always reminds me of my dad, I think he may have had a shirt made of that fabric at one point.
I’ve been trying different ways of doing the pictures in posts, including in this one. Please let me know what you think. Most of my early posts had the pictures as galleries which put them all on one line with smaller thumbnails. The last few posts have just had the pictures inserted which means they’re all on separate lines, take up a bit more space. I tried this one as a slideshow but the captions were an issue so I’m not sure about the slideshow, and I changed this post to a gallery.