My mom taught me how to sew when I was a child. For most of my adult life I did not have the room or the time to come back to it. Then I retired from homeschooling our six children, and the room we had used for school finally became something else: a sewing studio.
Coming back to the needle.
For years, sewing was set aside. Six kids, twenty-some years of homeschool, lesson plans, science fairs, all the beautiful chaos of a full house. There just was not room for a hobby.
When the homeschool days ended, I cleared out the homeschool room and put a sewing machine in it. My mom had quilted for years, and I had always wanted to learn. But she passed away before I could.
Six months later, I started anyway. I figured it was what she would have wanted.
"I never got to quilt with her. But my oldest sister Mary taught me what Mom had taught her."
What my sisters taught me.
My oldest sister Mary had been quilting the longest of any of us. After Mom passed, Mary taught me what Mom had taught her. And then a beautiful thing happened, almost without anyone deciding it: three of my four sisters and I became quilting sisters too.
Now I quilt with Mary, Melissa, and Cindy. We go on retreats together. We text pattern photos and fabric finds. The kind of thing Mom would have loved.
My sister Brenda does not sew, but she has her own gift. She is a gardener, and a wonderful one. Every family needs someone to keep the flowers growing.
The longarm machine.
About a year and a half into our quilting adventure, Mary made a case to the rest of us. None of us could longarm our own quilts, which meant sending every one of them out at real expense. If we pooled our money and bought a machine ourselves, we could finish our own work.
We bought the longarm in January 2020.
Two months later, the world shut down. The longarm lived at our house, and because we were the ones who could safely be near it, I became the one who got to play with it, learn it, and understand it. My sisters could not be in the room with me, but they cheered every quilt that came off the machine.
What I love about quilting.
Honestly, I love the piecing the most. I like puzzles, and I like putting shapes together to make something beautiful. There is something deeply satisfying about getting all those little pieces of fabric to behave.
But I also love longarming, because a fairly simple top can become something completely different once it has been quilted. The pattern of stitches transforms it. A plain quilt becomes an heirloom.
"Mom made our first quilt. A king-sized double wedding ring with scalloped edges, all hand quilted on a frame in her living room. Probably a year of her life."
Mom's quilt.
Mom made each of us a wedding quilt. Mine was a king-sized double wedding ring, extra long so it would go over the pillow, with scalloped edges. She machine pieced it but hand quilted the whole thing on a frame she set up in her living room. It probably took her a year.
If someone asked me to make that quilt today, knowing what I now know, I might run for the hills. But she did it with love, for each of her daughters. That quilt still lives on our bed.
Brad and the love language of quilts.
I have the best husband in the world. Brad supports me one hundred percent. He encourages me to make new quilts, gives me the freedom to shop for fabric and good machines, and asks how my projects are going every day.
He also confiscates as many of my finished quilts as he can. He says quilts are his love language — they make him feel warm and cuddly. So I have learned that I need to either have a clear plan for a quilt before I start it, or I should just plan on him keeping it.