Down Memory Lane

My friend Tracy has passed a quilt challenge on to me - the aim being to post a quilt a day for 7 days on facebook. I was about to post my more recent efforts, when I realised that everyone will have seen those and decided to go back to my early days instead. I have to say how much I'm enjoying thinking about those early quilts and the people I knew back then. It really is becoming a trip down memory lane. I'm on day 2 now and this is what I wrote about the first quilts...

 

Day 1 - My dear friend Tracy has passed the quilt challenge on to me and the aim is to post a quilt a day for 7 days. As I've been quilting since 1988 there are a lot of quilts to choose from! I decided to go right back and work through from the beginning...
This quilt was the second one I ever made and is a typical sampler quilt with blocks that I had made as part of a beginners course. It's hand pieced, hand appliqued and hand quilted. It took about a year to make and from then on I was hooked on all things quilting. I haven't seen this quilt in a while, as its stored in my house in England, but it was used and much loved for many years...
(Forgot to say this quilt was made in Brasilia, Brazil. I was a member of a lovely group of ladies called the Brasilia Piecemakers (we thought that was such an original name...) and was finished in 1993 so took 4 years to make!)
Day 2 -  Day 2 of the quilt challenge. Here is another quilt from my Brasilia days called 'Candy Wheels', which I made for my sister's 25th wedding anniversary. It's the first quilt I'd made to my own design and I was very proud of it. I'd learnt how to draft traditional blocks early on and then realised I could easily design my own, so I drew the pattern on good old graph paper (no computer assistance then!) with rulers and pencils.
At the time the US 'Quiltmaker' magazine had an on-going design competition which encouraged readers to submit their original patterns, and my design was published! I won a $100 US, which in 1992 was enough to buy quite a lot of quilting equipment! I spent a lot of time in those days designing with coloured pencils and had a second shot later on and won $100 with another design. Of course, I'm a computer addict now and everything I make starts life on my ipad but those early days were good fun.
The quilt was machine pieced and hand quilted and the fabric had to be ordered from the US as the Brazilian fabric available wasn't quite good enough for quilting.

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