Learning to Quilt--Teaching my Daughters

Once I made a quilt or two, I decided my daughters needed to learn quilting as well.  It's such a useful skill--being able to take scraps and bits and pieces of material and turn them into something useful and beautiful.  A quilt brings warmth to the bed and body, fills a need to be creative, and makes you feel so good inside when you look at what you've made.

I wanted to make things very simple for their first few projects, so I purchased charm packs--precut 5 inch squares in coordinating fabrics.  We planned 18 rows of 18 squares each.  This gave us enough overhang on each side and the bottom.

I also used a ruler to mark 1/4 inch on each side of the squares.  This was so the girls could easily see where they needed to sew the fabrics together.  They spent months handsewing those squares together.

Then I took those rows of squares and machine sewed each row together--this was mostly because it had taken so long to get to this point and I could tell they were getting discouraged and thinking they would never finish.  Once the tops were pieced together, we sandwiched the top, batting, and backing fabric together, pinning them together with large safety pins.

At that point, I ended up putting them aside for just over a year...but this past fall I pulled them out and machine quilted *in the ditch* (a term that means I sewed in the seam where two fabrics were joined together).  We used the backing fabric to form the binding and I machine sewed that down as well.

This is my oldest daughter's quilt. 

This is my youngest daughter's quilt.

We made sure to embroider their initials and the year in the bottom corner of each quilt so one day their granddaughters and great granddaughters can see these quilts and know who made them and when.