Leafing through a second-hand quilting magazine with colorful pictures of intricately, pieced fabric, my daughter looked up and protested, “How do they decide whether a quilt is beginner’s level or not? This doesn’t look like a beginner’s quilt to me.” She thrust the photo of a beautifully stitched quilt in front of me.
So says this child of mine who pulls out a sewing machine once or twice a year.
She laid the magazine down, refusing to look at any more triangles and tiny blocks assembled into a queen sized quilt and labeled easy enough for a beginner.
She looked across the room at the baby quilt she had come to my house to make for a friend. “Now that is a beginner’s quilt!”
Well yes, 12 nine-inch blocks with a two-inch sash around each is a beginner’s quilt – it might even qualify as a simple quilt. I made a similar, full sized quilt when I was about her age. Big blocks, colorful, simple to assemble, but it really impressed by my grandparents who hung it on the wall behind their sofa.
The simple quilt quickly and easily satisfies her need to create. She developed her own style last year as she helped me sort my stash of fabric. Stacking reds, pinks, blues, greens and violets, she stumbled across a couple yards of intriguing fabrics: one printed with colorful pages intended to be made into a toddler’s fabric book about insects and a piece printed with a child’s map of a city traversed with a road just the right size for Matchbox cars.
“It would make a great, reversible play quilt,” she said and began pawing through my stash of green fabric until she found a grassy print of shamrocks to sew between blocks as a border.
Within the hour, her newly claimed fabric covered our dining room table and I tried to show my lefty how to use a rotary cutter.
She tried but opted for shears for the cloth pages as well as the accompanying silhouettes of a dragon fly, butterfly, lady bug and bright yellow sunflower.
Raiding my sewing cabinet, she hauled out bug shaped buttons and cars to decorate the finished quilt and bonding fabric to stiffen the cloth bugs to make them appear to have just landed on the little quilt.
Spools of thread and stray pins cluttered the floor of the sewing room. She insisted she wanted to machine quilt it.
I talked, coached, sewed, sighed and insisted that we needed to take out and re-stitch haphazardly cuts, seams and machine quilting.
The house was a mess but we completed the play quilt for her son before she left that weekend.
I messed up her house in December as we talked our way through another simple, reversible baby quilt with blocks from a cloth book. She cut and sewed straighter lines, but I figured insufficient framing strips so we had to re-calculate and make do.
She returned last week to make her friend’s baby boy a play quilt similar to her son’s.
She sorted through my thrift shop and garage sale finds and chose a Bob the Builder book to use on the reverse side of another kid’s map I had found somewhere.
She ripped apart the completed book, trimmed the pages into blocks, figured out the spacing between the blocks and the number of strips needed to sew it together.
Between my work schedule, visiting with folks and taking care of her two-year-old, the simple quilt took us a couple of evenings.
Tuesday night she cut straight lines that sewed up quickly and easily into strips.
The blocks lined up evenly. The top and bottom sandwiched the flannel filler and pinned together smoothly.
Wednesday evening she machine quilted straight lines through the sandwiched material and finished it with a zig-zag stitch on the edge of the red quilt binding from a Smackover reader.
A simple quilt finished with very few glitches.
One more simple quilt like that and the two of us just might be ready to make one of those beginner quilts.
(A student of stitchery, Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. She can be reached by e-mail at joanh@everybody.org.)