My First Quilt

It's called Happy Scrappy Houses and boy was it scrappy! I look at this quilt and see scraps from old craft projects (mop angels) from the mid 90's, clothing from my family, an old halloween costume, fabric I've used for a bulletin board display at work, scraps gifted from friends, and a couple new fat quarters that caught my eye when I'd only dreamed of learning to quilt. LOL!

One Quilting for Dummies book later and voila! A little surfing on the net, and I fell in love with a project that seemed fitting for my collection of scraps and which I thought suited my abilities: http://quiltville.com/happyscrappyhouses.shtml

Then... i had to quilt it! oh my! I started hand quilting it with an echo pattern around the houses. That lasted for 2 houses and I picked it all out and said "No WAY!" I was too anxious to move on to another project now that I'd discovered my passion! So, being too inexperienced to know that I shouldn't be able to machine quilt my own projects, I dove in! (after a $25 purchase of a darning foot and a walking foot for my heavy-duty Kenmore) The results are more than passable (with confirmation from the owner of my LQS!) As a life-time doodler, I found the process of free motion to be extrememly FUN! No more hand quilting for this gal! (however, hand stitching the binding onto the back was something I found very soothing).

I added a hanging sleeve for display and another at the bottom. Inserting a very light-weight dowel in the bottom smoothed it out nicely against the wall.

Finished project: 62" x 62", machine pieced, machine quilted.