You Have To Start Somewhere - Recap


This post concludes my You Have To Start Somewhere series, I hope that you have been following along and if not, you can catch up anytime by clicking the links below.


The reason I started this series is because I felt it was important to not only document my early quilt-making work; but to be brutally honest about how I got started.  

Truth: we don't all start out making things like this:


Most of my early work; captured in those 6 earlier posts, was filled with mistakes and misguided interpretations of what a quilt was supposed to look like.
  • Whether it was the lack of quilting.  Can you call it a quilt, if there is no quilting?
  • The lack of actual binding
  • Or the randomness of fabrics that I used
While my Mom was a quilter herself, and may have handed me my first sewing/quilting book [I still have it], let me cut into her fabric stash, and offered answers when I asked for them, she didn't hover over me wielding a Quilt Police badge.  Okay, so she might have winced at the combinations I chose; but for the most part, she just let me play...and looking back, I'm thankful for that.


My Hiatus
My quilt journey pretty much stalled between the years of 1999-2010.  While I remember making a few small wall-quilts here and there, I don't have much record of them.  During this 11 year span, I was making a lot of garments; some of which you can read about here {Garment Sewing}.

I started a small online business Po-Ka-Dot making crochet and knitting needle holders/rolls.  It was my first adventure into being an entrepreneur...I learned a lot, even got some publicity in national crafting magazines.





And oh, yeah...I decided to buy an 1880's farmhouse and started renovating it.  You can see some of the bigger house projects here, here, and here...or just keep scrolling back to the earlier posts from this blog. That's actually how this blog got started...documenting my adventures in home renovation, and while now 95% of my posts are about quilting, my life is really a mix of modern fabric, and salvaged antiques.




Starting Again
I don't know exactly what happened to peak my interest in Quilting again; but I do remember discovering quilting Blogs; which were the gateway drug to more serious addictions like Flickr, The MQG, Pinterest, Twitter, so on and so forth.

While it might be easy to say that Quilting is like riding a bike and you never forget.  Considering the mistakes that I had made in the past with my early quilts, I was looking to start new.  I devoured tons of inspiration and learned how to quilt...the right way.  In that I mean...using a separate binding, and buying a walking foot so I could actually quilt my quilts (Hallelujah!).

The quilts that I made starting in 2010 show lots of progress, and while I am proud of those early quilts...I am sure happy that my newer quilts no longer look like that.

So, did you ever take a quilting hiatus?  Was it intentional?  What inspired you to start again?