Down memory lane

Hello, friends!  Long time no see! What can I say?  Life happens.  It has been a jam-packed couple of weeks. I went to my usual conference and participated in a panel presentation, which was fun and interesting, but exhausting.  The conference was in Pittsburgh this year, and let me tell you-- Pittsburgh is a beautiful city! We didn't get a lot of time to explore, but I would definitely go back. After the conference we went to visit the grandchildren, and that was pure bliss.  My oldest grandson kept calling me "honey," and they were all just a joy.

On the home front, I've been trying to sew, but literally every time I pull out the machine, someone wants to look at the house.  This is great, but frustrating! We think we may have found a house in Baltimore, too, if someone else hasn't bought it before this publishes.  The housing market is crazy!  We've scheduled times to look at houses, only to get canceled because someone bought it before we could get there.  I guess we'll know pretty soon, though!

Since I haven't been sewing, how about a trip down memory lane instead? I have a few pre-blogging quilts that I've never talked about and they're feeling neglected, so how about a good look at this one:

Wow, that's a lot of color! It's really a lot, because this quilt is huge-- 74 by 96. I'm pretty sure that was the biggest quilt I had made at that point.

I made this quilt in 2006 for my daughter to take to college.  She was very involved and helped choose the fabrics and the backing.  You can tell she's my kid, because I think there are 52 different fabrics in the blocks, plus the background, backing, and sashing, and all of them are colorful.  Most I wouldn't have chosen, but they work great here.

This quilt taught me so much.  It's from a pattern in Quiltmaker magazine (sorry that I didn't keep the pattern so I can't even tell you when it was published, but I think it was 2005) and is the first quilt that I fully paper pieced.  I think I had made a wall hanging size quilt to learn paper piecing, but the blocks here were all paper pieced.  I remember tracing the pattern onto a lightweight paper instead of using a copier, and there are 48 blocks, so you know that took forever.  It certainly did teach me paper piecing, though!

This quilt also taught me to measure twice.  It happens that I cut every single piece of the sashing half an inch too short.  10-inch blocks, 10-inch sashing, right?  I cried when I realized my mistake, but then I just cut more, which means that I had pieces of that pink hanging around here for years.  There's probably still some somewhere.

This might be the first quilt I had long armed, too.  It was such a behemoth that there was no way that I could even think of quilting it.  It's also quite heavy, but she went to college in Wisconsin and lived in the dorm, so it worked out! I certainly got no complaints that it was too warm.

I've been storing this for awhile, so now it's going back to live at my daughter's house.  We've talked a bit about cutting into two smaller quilts (horrors!) and that may happen someday if she has more kids.  I'd love to see grandchildren playing with the quilt.  It would make two perfect kid quilts, don't you think?

All this time later, I still love this quilt. It was way outside my comfort zone at the time, and I would do so much differently now (use a copier, for one), but it's still great. And my daughter still loves it, so that's a win all around.

Hope everyone is having a wonderful summer.  I'm going to try to pull out the machine this week and get some things done.  If someone buys the house, that would be better because I could make a mess again, so send all your good vibes! I'll be back sooner rather than later!

Sharing at Let's Bee Social, Confessions of a Fabric Addict, and Finished or Not Friday.