My First Quilt

I am so stubborn! Read directions? Not me! My way of learning is to jump into the middle and make ALL the mistakes that are possible and learn how NOT to do something. Why don’t I follow directions? Well, I try to but if they are not explicate enough or don’t have pictures…well; I’m just not good at following directions.
I wanted to try making a quilt so bought a “kit” - figuring that would be easy. The directions were pretty good but the things that were not spelled out became obvious very quickly. It started out with cutting the material. Rotary cutter was predicted to be the way to go, pile of quarters, template. Great, here I go. The Problem quickly became obvious when I started to sew. What the instructions didn’t tell me was NOT to cut to the edges of the pile of fabric – probably something that I should have figured out for myself. So, even though’ it appeared that the pile of pretty fabric was even at the edges, I ended up with some pieces that were smaller than others. Hence the non lined up blocks. Other problems were keeping the seams ironed in opposite directions – that didn’t work at all!
Why did I keep going to the end? Stubbornness I think! I figured that I had sunk costs and should just go ahead and keep making mistakes and get them all out of the way. Machine quilted without drawing lines – don’t do it!
If you squint at the quilt from across the room, it looks good. I just know about the errors and it bugs me but I am chalking this up to A Learning Experience and will enjoy this quilt anyway. Or someone will someone who doesn’t know enough to ask the hard questions – like a baby! Yeah, this will be a present to someone who has a baby and they can use it on the floor. Hurray for babies, we get to give them our mistakes and they like them anyway!
So…now onto my next quilt and I can’t wait to see the mistakes I make on this one. Usually I don’t make the same mistakes twice so projects are always interesting to me – what can I mess up next.

Bad lineup

Good Lineup