My first pieced quilt

I realized recently that I don’t have a digital picture of the first quilt I pieced. So I took one.

I made this the year I graduated from high school, 1996. I bought a book about strip quilting and bought the ruler, mat, and rotary blade. I had fun picking out the fabric. I remember being surprised at how much it cost (it doesn’t surprise me now). The design is a variation on the “trip around the world” pattern. I’d seen something about dimensional borders, I believe on Sewing with Nancy. So I sewed in a tiny blue flap of a border. I finished it with lace around the edge because I love eyelet lace, and flipped it.

Then we put it up on frames in the living room and my mom and I hand quilted it while watching the Atlanta Olympics. Neither of us had really hand quilted before. I used two colors of thread, blue thread around the blue squares and white thread around the white squares. I did one color and she did the other. My dad told me that I shouldn’t tie it because pieced quilts needed to be quilted, if I was putting that much work into the piecing, I needed to make the finished project look good too.

I named the quilt Rufus, because I thought that was a funny name. It’s a twin sized quilt and was on my bed all through college and even after I bought my queen sized bed. Then I put it on sideways and put pillows all at the top of my bed so you couldn’t tell the quilt wasn’t the size of the bed.