A Quilting Odyssey –
Almost 30 years ago a friend had convinced me to try quilting. I picked out fabrics, cut little squares and triangles from pieces of plastic food containers to use as templates and hand stitched each block. A short 6 months later I had a quilt top. Life became busy and the quilt top sat in the top of a closet for about 25 years.
First Quilt
Skip ahead a few years – In March of 2015, I pulled it out of the closet, purchased some batting and backing fabric and with my trusty old sewing machine managed to attach the front to the back. Let’s just say that the “old sewing machine” wasn’t exactly the right tool for the job. In the end it didn’t look too bad.Moving ahead to January 2018, I found myself with some time on my hands and in need of a new hobby. In just a few months one quilt turned into two then 5 then 10 and suddenly I realized this was not a hobby it was an obsession. I had managed to wrangle my sister Stephanie into this. For 3 months every evening we would sit at an 8 ft. table cutting and sewing. Weekends were for shopping for fabric.
The down side was that every other week we were running to those “Ladies of the Longarm” or “Masters of the Pantograph”. These were the ladies that would take our quilts and turn them into masterpieces. They were kind to us. During the first month or two they would look at our work and compliment us while holding back the criticism that we deserved. Our seams weren’t consistent, our blocks were anything but square and by the way, what is “setting a seam”. It didn’t take long for us to learn why this was important! Thank you to all those wonderful ladies.
By March I realized that I wanted to be able to do my own custom quilting. I purchased a “Millie” longarm quilting machine and now my life and my house will be changed forever. I have a full time day job that I love that is as far away from sewing and fabric as it can be. My dream is that in the next 15 years I can become what I would consider good enough to make a living at this in my retirement.
“Millie”
UPDATE – MARCH 2022 – Millie now has a new room!!!