Not A Chance
This is my first quilt. While I cringe a bit as I look at it, when it was made, I was quite proud of it. I suspect a number of you can immediately identify what decade it was made. For those of you unaware, peach and green were the dominant color choices in the 1980s. Much like many of you will look back to images taken now and realize “gray” was the name of the 2020s game.
I was a new bride in 1987, setting up home in a city far from anyone I knew. I didn’t have much money as I wasn’t working yet (long story) and Hubby had lost his job in Cleveland a month before our wedding. We sold the home we had purchased 5 months prior in Rocky River, OH and moved to Evanston, Illinois in search of work. I was an avid reader of “Country Living” magazine at the time. I loved the antique, handmade look, and a passion for finding old furniture I could renovate started. While we lived in a second-floor apartment in Evanston, I refinished (striping, sanding and urethaning) a large men’s dresser purchased at a thrift store for $100. Husband still uses it! Thus ensued shopping ventures to flea markets, antique stores and even auctions.
I also began to see quilts, especially at all those antique venues. I immediately loved them, though could not afford the lovely 19th century ones for sale at the time. I discovered a local quilt guild in 1991 by reading of their upcoming quilt show in the “Country Living” magazine, and I am still a member of that guild, Village Quilters, 30 years later! Quilts were often featured in “Country Living”, and I decided to make one when the article included a basic pattern. Believe it or not, I still have the pages from the magazine.
As I had never made a quilt, I found a local quilt store, The Apple Basket, in Evanston. The women there taught quilting the “old fashioned” way - completely by hand. With scissors. And cardboard. And handsewn with needle, thread and thimble. Of course, in 1987, almost no one knew a different way. The quilt is a “wild goose chase” block set with a flying geese border. I baulked at making all those border geese blocks by hand – tracing all the tiny triangles with templates and hand sewing them together was ridiculous. Mind you, I was three quarters of the way through making the quilt by hand when I realized I had a perfectly functional Pfaff sewing machine in my closet.
This machine was my high school graduation gift from my parents in 1982. It had not been used much during the 5 years I had it. Finally, with typical Humphrey ingenuity (i.e. make it up by the seat of your pants but insist you know what you’re doing) I figured out how to sew the thing together by machine and got the top done. Sans flying geese. When the top was complete I realized I had not trimmed the selvage off the fabric and it was exposed on one of the borders. I did not redo it – as one of my quilting girlfriends always says “done is good”. I’ve regretted that ever since.
I realized I should have made the flying geese border, and not have the darn selvage showing. I purchased some additional fabric – I still have it – with the intention of redoing that border. As you can see, that did not happen. That said, making flying geese at this point is ridiculously simple so the creation is not the problem.
This is a bit of a “give a mouse a cookie” problem. I would have to unquilt the borders. And then I would be upset because of course the batting is polyester and I would rather undo the entire quilt and change the batting to wool. Now, once the top is redone and new batting is at hand, I have to quilt the thing. Hand quilting a quilt this size would likely do my fingers in. With all my rock climbing, I don’t know if my fingers could even hand quilt. And contemporary quilting, mostly done on machines, is so lovely and dense, I would struggle to match what my current taste is with doing the quilting by hand. I could simply re-quilt it on a machine, but at that point, is it any longer my “first” quilt?
So, have I changed that border? Not a chance.