Beginning

Welcome to Susie Q Quilts!

Where to begin...

At the beginning, of course.

The whole quilting and patchwork thing didn't make sense to me. Why in God's green earth would you take perfectly good fabric and cut it up into little bits and sew it back together? I would occasionally watch Eleanor Burns (did she really just throw that on the floor?) and just not get it. There were a few other shows on PBS about quilting and, although I loved to sew, the quilting ones continued to mystify me. Even Nancy Zeeman's forees into patchwork and quilting just didn't do it for me.

Then 911 happened.

It shook my world. I was scared and afraid. What could they do next? I thought the world was ending. Really. My airline took a huge hit and the world that I always thought was safe and stable suddenly wasn't. I found myself searching for comfort in an uncomfortable world.

Along came quilting.

I loved to sew and I recalled how much comfort I got from so old quilts that my father's aunts had made. The quilts themselves were long gone but the memory of how happy they made me remained. The memory of how they seems to make every sore throat better, every upset tummy soothed.  How that soft yumminess felt and how the colors fed the eyes. Soothed. That was what I was looking for.

So I bought a book and bough some fabric and just started. Nobody told me that you had to go to classes. Besides I had been perfectly capable of teaching myself other things so why not this? There is no technique I won't try, no idea I won't pursue, and if you ask my husband, no fabric I won't buy! I get so tickled when I talk to other quilters and tell them, "No, I've never taken a class." You have to take a class? You have to have a pattern? Why wait...just do it!

Below is a picture of my first little project ( I almost always call them projects instead of quilts because then everyone thinks they are those bed sized monstrosities)

The book said that it was four blocks with the plain one in the middle. So I thought what if... and added more blocks. Rebel that I am.

So that was the beginning.

More later,

Susie Q