Quilting is in my Blood

I’m finding it more difficult to write my second blog, and part of it is that I have followers now which is both exciting and scary.  I’m learning more about blogging through participating in a new quilt bloggers group, and one of the best pieces of advice I’ve gotten so far is that my blog will be a work-in-progress, and I can implement improvements bit by bit. A future goal is to put a Follow Me on Bloglovin button on my blog. Enough about my blogging journey and onto my quilting addiction! One of my guilty pleasures is shopping online for fabric. Certainly, I’ve bought fabric from current collections, but I’ve found it especially helpful to find fabric that is out-of-print. I recently bought some Andover Low Tide Seagull fabric from an Australian Etsy shop because I could not find it anywhere in the U.S. And amazingly the price wasn’t much more than domestic prices including shipping. As much as I enjoy online shopping, there is nothing like shopping for fabric in quilt stores. I frequently go to my local quilt store, Threadbear, but like other quilters, when I travel, I really enjoy going to new quilt stores. I’ve been to two fabulous quilt stores in the past two weeks. When I visited my sister in Michigan, I went to Pink Castle Fabrics in Ann Arbor, and a couple days I went to Hip Stitch in Albuquerque.

It is so fun to see the fabrics in person that I’m familiar with from the internet. I especially enjoy seeing the colors, feeling the fabric, and to be able to tell how one fabric will work with another. I have to tell you that Lisa at Hip Stitch was wonderful to talk to, and with her enthusiastic but low-key sales approach, I ended up buying more yardage than I’d planned. My stash is starting to get out of control. Now that’s a problem I like having! Some of the fabric I bought yesterday is for some log cabin block swaps I’m doing on Instagram. You can follow me on Instagram at mringer58. People can request certain fabric colors, and one of my swap-mates requested yellow and light blue which are two colors that I have very little of in my stash. But Hip Stitch had the Zen Chic Numbers collection in stock, and I am very familiar with this collection from doing the super simple sample blocks tutorials posted by Sharon of colorgirlquilts.com. Color Girl Quilts Simple Sampler Block Tutorials I was given some beautiful fabric for my birthday in March by four different people, so I decided to improve my quilt piecing skills by following Colorgirlquilt’s wonderful tutorials. Here’s a pic of some of the blocks I completed.

I still have a couple more to do before I put them together as a wall-hanging. Alright, it’s time for me to start sewing. I will check in soon.

The slippery slope into my quilting addiction began quite innocently. In January 2014, I was browsing in the independent bookstore in my small town and saw they had a 2014 calendar on sale that had lovely photos of quilts. I decided it would be a bright, colorful calendar for my office and would bring up good memories of my mother who was an accomplished quilter. The one photo in the calendar that I frequently would look at was a rail-fence pattern made up of purple and blue batik fabrics.

Around that time, I started to get to know one of my work colleagues, Beverly, who had recently moved to New Mexico from Ohio. It didn’t take long to discover that quilting is one of Beverly’s passions. I shared with her my love of mosaics, telling her that “I quilt with glass because I didn’t get the sewing gene.” I never took Home Ec in school and hadn’t touched a sewing machine since junior high after making an apron and not being all that fond of the process.

Shortly after that, I decided to subscribe to the magazine, Quilting Arts, telling myself it was for inspiration for mosaics. I looked forwarded to perusing each issue and was absolutely astounded by what people could create using fabric. Though like mosaics, I wasn’t as drawn to the representational quilts as much as the photos of geometric-shaped and modern quilts in calendar.

As the year progressed, and I flipped each month of my calendar, I started to consider that maybe I could try some simple quilting. Another friend at work started encouraging me to buy a basic sewing machine to give it a shot. When I started checking out sewing machines online, it was pretty much a done deal. I ended up ordering a Brother sewing/quilting machine, but when it arrived, I was too scared to even take it out of the box. So it sat on the floor in my bedroom for a few weeks.

What finally got me to take my sewing machine out of the box was when Beverly forwarded an email on 10/10/14 with a subject line that said “Make the nifty, efficient 5-yard Everyday Quilt.” It was from our local quilt store, Threadbear, and the three-evening class was for “confident beginners.” Well, that certainly wasn’t me since I hadn’t touched a sewing machine in over 40 years and hadn’t even taken my sewing machine out of the box! But Ann, the owner of Threadbear, told me that she’d give me some extra help, and Beverly also offered some sewing hand-holding, so I nervously signed up for the class.

The next Saturday I hefted the box over to Beverly’s house, and we unpacked my sewing machine, and she patiently walked me through the basics of threading my machine, winding a bobbin, and introduced me to some of my presser feet. We had a heck of a time getting the walking foot attached, and it gave me grief for months to come, but I finally am more or less comfortable putting it on and taking it off. It helped to buy a short-shafted screwdriver to use rather than the useless disc Brother included to loosen the presser foot attachment.

Beverly encouraged me to get a 50% off coupon at JoAnn’s and get an Olfa cutting mat, rotary cutter, and a rolling sewing machine tote which I did prior to anxiously going to my first quilting class on 10/20/14 and started to learn the basics of piecing a quilt. I also got the fabric for my quilt at JoAnn’s which was fine for my first project, but since that time, I have developed a taste for beautiful quilt store-grade fabrics both at my local quilt store and online.

After learning to hold my thread tails down to avoid “thread throw-up” and ripping out many stitches after not making sure my seam allowances were facing the right way before sewing over them, I got 35 blocks pieced and even sewed the blocks together to make seven rows. Here’s one unsewn row with two of my supervisors:

Beverly helped me to sew my first three rows together, and lining up the blocks was HARD! I decided to put this project away and make some mug rugs for Christmas presents because by that time, I had become completely addicted to Pinterest and had pinned a few mug rug tutorials. I ended up making up my own simple pattern with using Rae’s cheater binding tutorial Made by Rae and had a great time making a bunch of them. I can only find a pic of one of them right now.

In early 2015 I began to plan making two other quilts for birthday gifts in late March. I’ll tell you about them in another blog.