My daughter Beth has watched me make quilts from the age of 3. In fact when she was four and running around the house, she tripped and fell on the edge of my quilt frame. She cut open an area under her chin requiring several stitches. Obviously that didn't traumatize her enough to stop her enjoyment for quilts. Over the years she would often help me pick out cotton fabrics for quilts and always showed a lot of interest in the different techniques I tried. In 1992 she even helped me marble my first cottons. We had fun trying out this new technique even though our first attempts were not very successful due to using the wrong paints. She has photographed my marbling process, which you can see under marbling. While I never got her to sew a quilt, she did attend quilts shows with me and expressed her opinion about the quilts she liked. A few years ago she even brought Pat to his first quilt show where I showed Log Cabin Blues and Florametric.
After her marriage, I had the newly weds go through the fabrics I have to pick out colors for their wedding quilt. My daughter choose the brown and blue colors she wanted and made it clear to me what blues and browns she didn't want also. We spent several hours selecting fabrics. My new son-in-law stood in the background simply listening. Quilts and choosing fabrics was an entirely new experience for him so he let Beth make the choices. Wise man. I also painted numerous cottons a few months later, which Beth then picked through for the quilt.
It took several more months for me to formulate a design idea since I knew it wouldn't be a traditional pattern. I kept changing ideas though until finally I decided to sew the kind of quilt I enjoy the most. This quilt is in the free form category where there was no plan except that I would be creating blocks and set them on point. As I sewed each block, they went up on my design wall to study and rearrange until I found a placement I liked. This is a very time consuming process but eventually I found an arrangement I liked. Some blocks never made it into the quilt.
The quilting took many months because of the size and using the metallic threads, which can be difficult at times doing free motion quilting. I gave them their new quilt around their first anniversary. As we laid the quilt on their bed the two cats immediately assumed that the quilt was for them. We hadn't even straightened it out before they were both settling in on top of it. The cats evidently had forgotten the fact that I had already made them three cat quilts for the previous Christmas with some of the blue and brown fabrics. My daughter assured me though that the kitties would not be sleeping on the new quilt.
