After all my experiments, I felt I was finally ready to actually make my first "real" quilt out of all those green scraps I'd collected.  It was about three months after I'd first decided that I would make a quilt, and I felt I had learned enough from my various experiments with the mini-quilts to make a full sized one.



Despite my knew-found knowledge, I really had only the vaguest of ideas of how to go about accomplishing "making a pretty quilt", but I knew that having a plan was an important part of it! So, I drew out a rough sketch of what I wanted to do, and sorted my scraps into piles to go with my drawing and began the process of making my first full sized quilt top.



Because I was using scraps from various projects, my fabrics were, of course, all different. There were cotton scraps from little shirts I'd made for my boys all those years ago, there were long swaths of leftover fabric from a long-ago guest room's curtains and sheers, there was silk taffetta from that same guest bedroom's dust ruffle and pillow shams and cotton scraps from my "vintage apron" phase, and a hundred other projects.




In the end, my first quilt, imperfect as it was, was quite beautiful in my eyes


I was also trying (despite the fact that I hadn't yet figured out what those pesky feed dogs were, or how to "lower" them) some stippling:


As you can see I did a mix of stitch-in-the-ditch for the squares (or at least, my attempt at it - I had not yet mastered quilting a straight line!), free hand hearts and loops, stippling on the brocade and a sad attempt at scallops on the sashing.







For a first quilt, I was, and still am, extremely happy with it. Maggie, agrees:






Because it was my first quilt, and I hadn't yet caught on to the naming convention quilters have, this quilt has been known and likely, ever will be known as: "The Green One".

But all of what's coming is this quilt's fault.  I fell madly in love while I was making this quilt, knew that from that point forward, quilting would be the main creative passion in my life. 

After 35 years of singing, who knew?  :)