Wendy, I'm kind of a "backwards" beginner, if that makes sense... I bought my first sewing machine two and a half years ago and I've only made a handful of pieces--I can count them on my two hands... My sister taught me the basics and then I went at it, well, sort of...
My first piece was a kit, paper-pieced and the pieces were so tiny that once the different elements were assembled I had to hand them over to my sister to put the full picture together because I was failing miserably at matching pieces and putting them together and getting the seams to fit . You can see the quilting and the piecing on my part is pretty nasty, but I could not make myself do a nine patch as my first attempt...
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Then I wanted to do applique' so I found something I liked in Quiltmania and with my sister's guidance on how to do raw edged applique' I came up with this little wall hanging. I did all the quilting myself but I did not know how to do background quilting and for fear of it looking ugly, you can see the background is still not quilted... I think I can go back and do that now, right?
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To welcome me into their quilting world, my mom and sisters invited me to do a round robin. This is the center of the quilt that belongs to me--I was ripping my hair out trying to do a circle-in-a-circle and refused to applique' it onto a background. Instead of keeping the material supple, I actually starched the circles to death making it even harder to complete the task... but it was done!
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So, then I was ready for a throw! But I had to do a practice piece to make sure I could match corners, etcetera, so I made this runner and practiced quilting with a vengeance because I thought the fabric so ugly, I did not care if my quilting looked horrible. At a distance of time, I actually like the quilting I did back then...
So then I did the actual quilt... it was, I believe a McCall pattern from a magazine, but I wimped out on the quilting, so my sister did it for me... I'll post the runner and the throw in the next posting because there is no more room for photos here...
You might have seen my pineapple quilt on the FORUM, along with one AAQI quilt and I've posted my SEDONA STAR 2012 BOM in Show and Tell as I've gone along, and THAT'S IT!!! All of it has been a complete struggle, because I started the hard way and slugged my way through it; it takes me forever to get any of this stuff done; when I saw Lorchen's posting about wanting to quit quilting, you don't know how close I actually was to quitting!!! So, I've decided to go BACK TO BASICS and learn all the stuff that I should have started with in the first place! Deep down, I know I love quilting but I just have to find a way of easing my way into things. With the exception of the pinwheel, I have never made any of the blocks in Laura's sampler... so I think it's time for me to take a deep breath and build some basic skills (which I should have done at the beginning...). Make sense?