My First Quilt with Hillary Cooper

It's the last Friday of April, which means it's time for another My First Quilt interview! This month Hillary Cooper shares the story of her first quilt.

Hillary is a quilt pattern writer from Vancouver, British Columbia. She's a lifelong maker and serial crafter whose modern patterns often reinvent traditional blocks through colour and improv piecing.

You can connect with Hillary at her website and on Instagram.

And now, here is Hillary's first quilt!

What year did you make your first quilt? What prompted you to make it?

I made my first very basic quilt in 1997 when I moved to Vancouver and was looking for ways to fill my time while my husband was at work. We had just moved across the country from Toronto and I had no friends or family nearby. I hoped starting a new hobby would help me to find community. That year I fell in love with quilting and followed up that first quilt with a quilt sampler class that I finished and gave to my sister as a wedding gift when she was married in 1998. 

What techniques were used in that first quilt? Did you quilt it yourself?

The first quilt was a basic 5" square block where we alternated colours in a checkerboard format and then tied the quilt at each intersection. Great quilt for practicing a 1/4" seam and many people were gifted one that year for their new babies.  

The sampler that I made tried many different techniques including traditional piecing, using templates and applique. I cut all my pieces with scissors. I'm pretty sure I didn't have a rotary cutter back then. The wedding quilt was quilted by a longarmer (must have been among some of the first) in order to make sure it would be ready for the wedding.

Who taught you to make the quilt?

I took classes at my local quilt shop called The Cloth Shop. Back then they were located in a beautiful brick and mortar on 10th Avenue. They serviced machines in the back and had classes in the basement. I actually recently found the pattern instructions from that very first quilt and the instructor had given us her home phone number!

The book Hillary used for her first sampler quilt

Are the colours you chose for your first quilt ones you would still choose today?

The very first quilt was light pink and blue which are often what I use today but the quilt for my sister which was my first "real" quilt was very much a quilt of the 90s using browns, forest green, maroon, and navy. That is not really my colour palette today. 

Did you fall in love with quilting right away? Or was there a gap between making the first quilt and the next one?

I actually did a rent to own with the first sewing machine because I knew I didn't always stick with all the crafts I liked to try. However, I was an actress back then and I loved how making a quilt allowed me to be creative but had a beginning, middle and end. The issue with acting is that most of what you do is audition and that can be frustrating and demoralizing to never get to see the work progress. I loved quilting and loved that everyone was excited to receive a piece of my work. I became obsessed and quickly moved from learning to experimenting and doing my own thing with the fabric. At the beginning that meant creating picture stories with applique. I have an early one where I found a panel and then paired it with Sunbonnet Sue and Sam as a baby quilt. That recipient is now 27 and still travels with the rag that it has become everywhere.

This early quilt of Hillary's has been well loved!

Where is the quilt now?

The very first quilt with the squares, I have no idea. I don't even remember who I gave it to. Probably a cousin. The wedding quilt is in my sister's cupboard (see my eye roll here). And the Sunbonnet Sue as I said is with my friend's daughter and I have seen it and I'm pretty sure that calling it a quilt now would be generous.

Is there anything you wish you could go back and tell yourself as you made that first quilt?

Enjoy the process. This is something that is going to bring you so much joy later in life.

Anything else you want to share about your first quilt?

If we are talking about the squares I think I might go back and make some more because it's such a great way to use scraps and play with colour. With the wedding quilt, I'm so glad that was the first major quilt I tried because it covered so many different techniques and helped me hone skills that would give me confidence.

Thank you, Hillary for sharing the story of your first quilt(s)!

Portrait of a Flower Mini Quilt and TGIFF

Welcome to another TGIFF party, where we celebrate our finishes!

This year for Stash Artists members, I'm creating a new mini quilt pattern every month. I'm having so much fun with it! I have so many quilt ideas I want to make, so this keeps me playing with something new every month. If you're not a Stash Artists member yet, you can join us and get in on the mini quilt fun, too!

The April Mini of the Month is Portrait of a Flower. It's a fun mix of piecing and appliqué, with a big, bold flower taking center stage.

It was also ridiculously hard to get a good picture of it 😆 No matter what I tried, the colours look more flat than they are in real life. I bought myself a bouquet of flowers to use as a photo prop, hoping they'd make for more interesting pictures.

Even with a special daylight light and some editing, the colours weren't quite right. The flowers sure are pretty, though!

I've always loved appliqué quilts. My very first quilt was an appliqué quilt and I rarely go long without doing at least a little bit of appliqué. Like most I've done, this is fusible, raw-edge appliqué. I keep telling myself I'm going to learn needle-turn appliqué, but haven't tried it yet, probably because I keep doing EPP as my hand stitching project and there are only so many hours in the day!

I chose to only stitch around the flower pieces with the quilting, and I used my free motion foot to go around each shape three times close to the edge with matching Aurifil 50 wt thread (1135 for the yellow and 4225 for the purple). For the flower center, I also quilted a spiral from the edge into the middle of the circle. For the flower petals, I only quilted at the edges, leaving the petals to puff up a little.

For custom quilting like this, I'm usually making it up as I go along. I rarely know what I'll do in all the various parts before I start. So once the flower was finished, I looked at it for a while before deciding to do a dense loopy meander in the background around the flower. I then decided to do a tiny spiral meander in the purple. I didn't realize before I started how similar it would look to the loopy meander around the flower, especially since they're both pretty much the same scale, and by the time I noticed I had quilted enough of it that I wasn't interested in ripping it all out. I'm calling it a lesson learned, not a mistake!

The back and forth lines in the white sashing break up the sameness of the quilting nicely. The yellow cornerstones have the same back and forth lines, but on a diagonal.

I love, love, love how the quilting looks on the back!

The flowers do make a nice prop 😊

For the binding, I really wanted to use the same dark purple I used for the flower petals, but didn't have enough. Purple is one of those colours that can be hard to match, since it can have either blue or pink tones, and I didn't have enough of any other dark purple that had the right tone to match the flower. I did have two that were similar enough that I thought I could get away with using them both, which would give me enough for the binding. It's really hard to tell it's not the same fabric all the way around the quilt!

When I was decorating for Christmas, I was looking for a place to hang my Let It Snow mini and ended up using really strong magnets to hang it on the fridge. Since it wasn't Christmas-specific, I left it up until almost the end of March, but then it felt like it was time to take down the snowman (even though we still have a lot of snow!). The fridge felt really bare, though, so I tried Portrait of a Flower and was thrilled to see it fit perfectly. The magnets are from the innards of a computer and their odd shape looks kind of like a frame on the corners of the quilt. I think I'll always have a quilt on the fridge now!

That's one of our wedding pictures above the quilt

That's my most recent finish. What's yours? Link it up below, then be sure to visit some of the other links to celebrate their finishes, too!

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

My First Quilt with Marlene Oddie

Did you blink and the month of March disappeared? Me, too! Fast as it may have been, it's the last Friday of the month and I have another first quilt story to share with you. This time Marlene Oddie is sharing the story of her first quilt.

Marlene (Baerg) Oddie is an engineer by education, a financial services systems professional by experience, a project manager by profession, and a quilter by passion. She believes in the KISS (Keep It Simple S______) method and has incorporated this into the company name.

You can connect with Marlene at her website, on Instagram, on Facebook, and on YouTube.

And now, here are Marlene's first quilts! First, one she made as a child.

And then the first quilt she made as an adult.

What year did you make your first quilt? What prompted you to make it?

As a child about 1978. (As an adult 2001.)

My neighbor said it was a right of passage to make a quilt so she took the time to teach me to blanket stitch sun bonnet sues and overall sams with fabric scraps from clothes my mom had made me onto muslin. Sashed it by machine and tied it with a Holly Hobbie sheet on the back.

2001...9/11 prompted me to consider my legacy...and my local church started offering quilting classes. After joining and making a flag from the scrap bin I quickly ended up leading out at subsequent sessions after the teacher was in a car wreck. 

What techniques were used in that first quilt? Did you quilt it yourself?

Adult: Machine piecing, including some strip/strata style sets to make the star field. I quilted a big star on the star field and in the ditch of the stripes. I tucked under the edges of the top and bottom and sewed around the edge. Not really any binding. But that is how we had done the "as a" child quilt in 1978.

Who taught you to make the quilt?

Child quilt. Velma Judson

Adult quilt...just did it on my own.

Are the colours you chose for your first quilt ones you would still choose today?

Not really.

Did you fall in love with quilting right away? Or was there a gap between making the first quilt and the next one?

Big gap! About 23 years.

Where is the quilt now?

I still have it. The flag hangs on my shop wall to show how far I've come.

Is there anything you wish you could go back and tell yourself as you made that first quilt?

Blanket stitch isn't the only way to make a quilt.

Anything else you want to share about your first quilt?

I'm grateful now for my neighbor who gave me a seed of inspiration that took awhile to germinate.

Thank you, Marlene, for sharing the story of your first quilt!