Eight Years and Two Millennia

My family was cleaning the garage a few weeks ago and we found this quilt. It was in a box labeled toys from my now 17 year old son's room that never got unpacked when we moved here from North Carolina.

Here's my quilt history: I always loved to sew clothes. During the years when my weight fluctuated because of pregnancies, I got frustrated. I wanted to try quilting because it sounded easy. I knew I could make beautiful clothes, so how hard could a couple of squares be? I moved to Illinois and made friends with my neighbor, Julie, a quilter. She encouraged me to try and helped me get started. It was the most humbling sewing experience of my life. It was way harder than it looked. I made a hand quilted quilt that I hung on the large expanse of wall created by my cathedral ceilings in North Carolina. People would come in, admire it, and exclaim, "Oh, you make quilts!" I would answer, "No. I made quilt. That's it."

I often said, "Thank goodness for Sears quilts. Because of them, few notice how bad mine is!" I enjoyed my quilting phase, but I knew I wanted to return to making clothes. I have some pretty wall hangings and one lap quilt to remember the phase by, but I don't quilt now.

In the meantime, my oldest son was intrigued by my quilting. I have a little wall hanging he made that has six enormous squares on it. He was five when he made it. He named it "shapes." It is machine quilted and the stitching lines bear little resemblance to the seam lines. It's very cute.

He started this quilt in 1999 in Watertown when he was nine and in fourth grade. He machine pieced all the squares himself and hand quilted three lines of stitching before he forgot about it. You can see in the photo that some of his stitches are perpendicular to each other. He, too, was humbled by quilting!

I remember this quilt lying around in North Carolina and I occasionally suggested he work on it, but he never did. When we found it in the garage, he seemed so pleased to remember it and his quilting. I knew I needed to finish it so it would be a displayable memory.


I really finished it more for his future wife than for him. I hope he has a wife who will respond to a guest's exclamation of "Oh, you quilt!" by plucking it off the wall, saying "No, Andy did," and telling the whole story.

I took the lazy way out and just folded the backing over the front for the binding. I don't like it. First, I prefer a contrast binding, and second, the machine stitching that secures the binding to the quilt before it's folded over helps anchor the batting, and this minimally quilted quilt could have used it. I didn't want to put too much time into this, though. I think the abandoned quilting adds to its charm as a young boy's project.

I did machine stitch between the squares and the border, because it really needed something to anchor it.

The best part of the quilt is the name Andy chose. He seemed so pleased that I was finishing it, and he found it funny that it had taken so long. I told him that since it's his quilt, he needs to name it, so he came up with "Eight Years and Two Millennia." The label says "pieced and hand quilted by Andy, 1999" and "machine quilted and bound by Alana, 2007."

We've covered a lot of ground since "Shapes."