iQuilt

I’ve spent my whole life sneaking into fabric shops. Normally the type of person who makes her presence known, I tiptoed through the entrances, wanting to stay under the radar of the well-meaning shop ladies. It’s not that I didn’t want to talk to them (in my experience, they’re almost all tooth-achingly sweet), it’s just that I didn’t know how to answer their questions, what to say when they asked what I was making…because until very recently, I wasn’t making a damn thing.

For many years, it was enough just to look at the fabric, to buy a little bit if it really spoke to me, and to stack it neatly on the bookcase in my studio (ahem, guest room). I love fabric. Love. The colors, the textures, the tiny repeated elements, the striking large-scale designs….love.

A week ago, though, I took my first quilting class, and suddenly (imagine one of those technicolor-cinematic-sunray-angel-singing moments here), I wanted—and knew how to—make stuff.

My newly acquired skills have done nothing to diminish my indecent fabric-store-lurking, but they have ensured the future integrity of my bookcase, now groaning under the weight of the fat quarters and the “two, no, make that three yards” of randomly selected textiles.

Ok…I should back up. “Skills” might be too strong a word for learning to learning to place one strip of fabric near another to create a visually pleasing display. It’s simple stuff I’m doing. Basic. Beginner. Nothing wild and crazy and Amish or anything like that.


But despite, or maybe because of, the tactile simplicity of my new hobby, I adore it. I chose a basic 16-patch quilt to start with (they’re similar to—just a little bigger than—the blocks shown here), and have made eight blocks so far. Each is different and each is so inordinately pleasing to me that I can’t believe I done it sooner.

I promise I’ll take snaps tonight, at quilting class #2. I'm so excited I've been watching the clock all day, not getting a damn thing done at work, just looking at quilting sites online. What is it with these sites, anyway? Why do so many of them look like they were designed on Commodore 64s?