I’m sure you’ve heard every Mother In Law joke around, right?
I know I have…. And many of them are funny.

My MIL (read: Mother In Law) is a great lady.
Sure, she gives me a lot of material to make fun of her about…. but she and I share a lot of common interests.
One of them is quilting.

When I was first dating my husband he took me home with him for Thanksgiving… You know. For me to meet the family and to be given the traditional girlfriend interview. (Such a fun experience, by the way.) I believe it was there that I first found out that my future MIL knew how to quilt. You can just imagine how impressed I was, given my own horrific attempt at quilting.

My husband and I were married in April of the following year and soon after moved into the In-Laws’ place to save some money. (Yeah. What a joke!) My “official” entry into the art of quilting was in September of 2001 when my thoughtful Mominlaw signed us up for a beginning quilting class. I was so excited to finally learn the right way to quilt. The class was so amazing, I learned so much, and it was in that beginning quilting class that my Mominlaw and I became real friends. I am so grateful to her for helping me to learn something that I had long desired to do. If not for her I know it would have been YEARS before I would have tried quilting again.

My very first quilt, a result of beginning quilting with the MIL, was this Halloween quilt.

I messed the binding up pretty good on it, but I was very happy with the rest of it. I really love the Sawtooth Star block and have since made this very same quilt pattern twice as baby quilts.

This creation was the second quilt that came out of my “production studio”.

As you can see, I still had no clue how to bind a quilt properly and I also had a crappy camera. *Oh well, right? Everyone has to start somewhere…..

This quilt was done just last year and was my ninth quilt.

Did you notice that I actually did a decent binding on that one?

I was about twenty years old when I first got the itch to learn to quilt.
I had become very interested in scrap quilts. Now, when I say, “scrap quilt”, I mean the true-blue, unplanned, use your scraps from many years of many projects, and sew them together to make a seemingly unorganized masterpiece.

Whenever I would see a scrap quilt I would wonder about each individual fabric represented in the quilt. I would wonder what project the fabric was originally meant for and also from what time period the fabric was from. The beautiful scrap quilts that I came across always seemed like the warmest quilt that I had ever seen. I would always feel that if that scrap quilt were mine that I would get the best sleep every night because it would keep me so very warm and safe. I don’t know exactly why scrap quilts make me feel that way….. I suppose it is because they just look so cozy, usable and loved.

So there I was. Just out of my teens and completely broke. I wanted to take a quilting class but soon found out that I couldn’t afford any of the ones that I came across. So I decided to become resourceful. I “borrowed” (read: stole) a quilting book from my Mom that my Grandpa had given her and then I went to the local thrift shop and bought myself a very old New Home sewing machine that came in a very ugly cabinet. I had full intentions of refinishing the cabinet, but here it is nine years later and it looks exactly the same as it did the day I bought it.

My Mom, however, was very excited that I bought myself a sewing machine. She insisted that the machine needed servicing so she drove out to my apartment, took my machine from me, and when she brought it back she taught me how to sew on it. That event in my life just happens to be one of my top ten favorite memories. Being one of six kids means that one on one time with Mom is rare. And when it happens, it is special. But, I digress…

I am a pretty impatient person, so I am loathe to tell you that I did not fully go through the book the way it was intended. I just skimmed through and pretty much decided that I could figure it out on my own. I just picked out some of my favorite fabric scraps, cut them out into what I thought were some really great shapes, and sewed them together to the best of my ability. And that is how my very first quilt block came to be.

Of course, I immediately hated this piece of work. To me, it was just plain ugly and a lot of work. So did I forge ahead anyway? Uhhhh…. no. I gave up quilting altogether until about three years later. But that is a story for another post.
I came across this block in my scrap bag the other day and I immediately wanted to put my very first botched attempt at a block into a quilt. I now love my first attempt. It is imperfect in almost every way imaginable. But I think it the most beautiful block that I have ever made.