Years gone bye

I’ve just spent a few hours looking at all the quilts from easystreet by Bonnie Hunter, and the more quilts I looked at the more I like the real scrappy ones, not the ones that looked like Bonnie’s.  Now don’t get me wrong I think hers  is beautiful, but this was a scrappy quilt, so I expected people to use scraps they had, not go and buy the fabric for the quilt.   I spent 2 weeks during Christmas working on the quilt, and I loved every minute of it, I didn’t buy any fabric for this quilt, all the material I used was material I already had.  I kept feeling my grandmothers hand on my shoulder saying “go girl, now you understand”.  She quilted crocheted knitted and painted.  I’m sure she didn’t go out and buy the fabric for her quilts but used material from clothes or sheets or whatever.  I know that we should use cotton thread on are quilts, but shhhhh for the piecing I use polyester as my grandmother had spools and spools of thread, and I refuse to throw it away and go buy cotton.  I have to be realistic with myself, I am never going to be a good quilter, with working full time and having so many different crafts I am interested in  I just don’t have the time or patience to be a good quilter.  So my quilts are not going to be handed down and become treasured treasures, they are just going to be for my pleasure.  The one thing that will take a long time with all my quilts is going to be the hand quilting part.  Yep hand quilted, first I don’t want to pay a $100 dollars to have someone machine quilt It for me.  I also am not sure I like the idea of machine quilting a hand made quilt.  I know I pieced the quilt using a sewing machine, so what is the difference?  Well for me I sewed the pieces together, not someone else.  I remember one of the last quilts my grandmother made, she had finished it and was going to start the hand quilting on it, when my dad came up with the idea to use the sewing machine to quilt it.  He sat down at the sewing machine and machine quilted the quilt, and my grandmother just kept saying “that is not the right way”.  I guess for me I am like my grandmother, it’s just not the right way.