First Quilt

Sort of.

My first large foray into quilting was after I purchased Fons and Porter’s “Quilter’s Complete Guide” which includes a whole bunch of info about a whole lot of different piecing and quilting techniques. It gives you all you need to make a sampler. Well, I started working on it right after moving back home after college which happened to coincide with my little sister’s entrée into high school. I figured four years would be plenty of time for me to figure out the whole quilting thing and I planned on making her a quilt for graduation.

This would actually end up being my second quilt because after spending three years making the quilt top I didn’t want it to be my first try at quilting. So I made a small simple quilt top so that I could understand the quilting process before working on the gigantic sampler I spent ages toiling over.

While working on the quilt top for my sister’s sampler I got to try many different piecing styles and I found that I really enjoyed doing Celtic designs with strip appliqué. I found a Celtic design that I really liked, a triscele, but it wouldn’t work with strip appliqué because it involved width changes throughout the knot. So I decided that I’d make somewhat of a plain background using various shades of blue and purple and use the triscele as part of the quilting design.

I whipped up the quilt top (kind of skipping over the squaring step as you’ll notice in the pictures) and got to work learning how to quilt. This is the result.

I ended up giving it to my other sister who happened to be moving to the Big Island for grad school at the time. She and I are both fans of all things Irish (we’re Irish ourselves) having travelled there after college together, and getting matching Celtic harp tattoos. It’s actually the Guinness logo backward – it was the best picture of a Celtic harp that I could find – fortunately we both really like Guinness.

More about that first/second quilt later.