Creating art, has always been a part of my life. It has evolved over the years, & become something I HAVE to do. It is a way of journaling, & playing, & expressing some of my inner most feelings.  I have gone from very literal to more abstract.

I love teaching others how to quilt, seeing the light bulb suddenly come on. It thrills me to have people tell me I made a difference for them. I became a nurse because I wanted to help people, yet quilting has fulfilled that desire every bit as much, if not more.

I have not always been a very good quilter. My very first quilt (made in 1978) won Abominable Mention in The world's Worst Quilt Show 1997. It was so bad I gave up quilting for years. It takes practice & time to become a good quilter. I challenge every one of my students to show me a 1st quilt that they made that even comes close to being as bad as mine. This is it in the picture, "Grandpa & Grandma's Kids". I got the idea from a classroom quilt I saw in a magazine. We (my mom & sister & friends) were doing a lot of "Artex" & "Trichem" paints at the time. They had home parties like Tupperware, & you spent lots of money & took turns hosting to buy more. I had all of my parents granchildren make their own pictures, & the ones who were too little the mom's did. The cameo of a boy in the lower left represented my 2nd child who died at 2 1/2 months. My mom loved the quilt, & when she passed away Dad gave it back to me, so I share it with my students in my machine quilting classes.

It is zigzag quilted (I'd only seen mattress pads machine quilted), I used the fattest poly batting I could find. I quilted it on a small portable sewing machine, on a vanity dresser only 14 inches deep, & I wrestled it into submission. No wonder I gave up quilting for years after that!

copyright  ©  1977

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