The Joumey #3

A few more quilts that look back on my quiltmaking journey. See the first two here:

The Journey #1

The Journey #2

Moving into the 1990's now, life was busy as a wife, mother, tax professional, Longaberger Basket Sales Associate, and very active quilt guild member. I was making lots of small quilts for magazine publication and bed-size quilts for my family. I was also in a 6-woman group who went on an annual retreat and made 6 queen-size quilts, one for each of us, over 6 years. I also made several banners for my church. The only way I know these things is because I kept a scrap book of all the quilts I made in those years and today, I have that information.

By now I had started to speak to quilt guilds in the area. At a talk in 1992 for the Batting Brigade guild of Florence, AL, I learned about their upcoming "Nature" challenge. I bought the two-fabric kit that had to be used, a blue and a green. The finished quilt had to be a shape other than a square or rectangle--quite a challenge for those early days of "art-style" quilts. My entry, called "What Goes Around, Comes Around":

The desgin is based on a Franklin Mint plate seen in an advertisement. To draw the dolphins, I found a child's coloring book with sea creatures. The bird was cut from an Oriental print and fused in place. This was my first attempt at some of these more "artistic" quilt techniques and though today it lives in a closet, I still like it.

More fan blocks were won at a guild meeting in 1993--these Amish-style fans had black backgrounds and solid colors. I named it "Wheel of Fortune" and gave it to my eldest son, Joshua:

The back was pieced too, something I continue to do frequently:

In 1993 I got more blocks in a group swap with the guild board and made "Good & Plenty". I think one of my sons has it as I no longer do:

The back is a bars-style design, a popular Amish design though the food print would not have been used in an Amish quilt:

When I stumbled across this next photo I was surprised--I have no memory of this quilt or where it went. Fortunately, on the back was written "Plaid Country" and dated August 25, 1997:

It was longarm machine quilted from the looks of it, and I am sure there is a label on the back with the name of the quilter but I have no memory of it today. I believe it was given to my younger son, Andy, seen here, because I think it was made for him to take to college--in Arizona--I thought it funny I made a quilt with lots of flannels, including the back, for him to take West.

There are many more completed projects in these years, many wallhangings and baby quilts and class samples. But I'm coming to the end of my scrap book so notes with dates and all the written details are almost done. Once we got digital cameras, our photos became "files" and are only saved on hard drives--which eventually die. I have digital images of most of my quilts made since the mid-1990s but unless I have the quilt so I can read the  label, much of the information is no longer there.

Do future quilt-lovers a favor and start keeping some kind of written log of your work, along with photos--unless you plan to live forever. Your work will.

Let's quilt!

Barbara