My Very First Quilt – Ever!

Nancy Smeltzer's first quilt - 1976I haven’t always used extensive embellishment on my art quilts. In fact, the first quilt I ever made was a traditional pieced quilt. (see the center section of that quilt in the photo on the left.) I was  in grad school at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, back in 1976, and since it was the Bicentennial Year, people were looking back at America’s roots. I was enrolled in an Art Teacher Ed program, because at the time, that was the only grad program they had in night school. I was fortunate, however, to be able to take most of my studio classes in textiles, and when I saw a class in traditional quilting, I thought that would be fun. I picked out my fabrics and embarked on making  a queen sized quilt.

“Queen sized quilt!” The teacher was dumbstruck that we all weren’t starting with a pillow, or a small throw for a sofa. She had been used to teaching more traditional classes around the community, and I think this was her first college class. She didn’t realize what big aspirations we had through our lack of ignorance of how the whole process worked. So, I picked a pattern and the sashes that go in between, calculated how much Variation of the traditional quilt block, "Cross and Crown", the first quilt made by Nancy Smeltzerof each color I would need, bought what seemed like miles of fabric, and set to cut out the pieces.

HOURS later, I had all of the little pieces stacked into the appropriate shapes and colors, and sat down to the sewing machine to begin to combine the pieces into the correct sequences. I’ve never been one for production line work. If I had, I would have sewn all of the little blue bars to the larger beige, flowered rectangles and then gone on to another combination. I wanted to see a whole square finished all at once, so while terribly inefficient, that’s how I proceeded. I very quickly found that I really needed to measure the seam allowances carefully, because 1/16″ or 3 mm off very quickly got magnified as I moved further and further across the quilt. This quilt, measuring 78″ x 80″, or 198 cm x 203 cm has a lot of pieces that vary in size due to inaccuracies in sewing seams.

The above central quilt square, ( 9″ x 9.5″ or 23.75cm x 24 cm) used throughout the quilt, is a variation of the traditional block, “Cross and Crown”. While usually the cross is oriented vertically, I decided to turn it on its side. I also didn’t use the points on the crown, just in case there are some traditional quilters reading this blog and saying, “That’s not a Cross and Crown!”. I hand quilted it with doubled black thread, as I didn’t want all of that hand work not to show up, but now, years later, I realize how stark that double thread is. The quilt was used on the bed for probably five years and washed a number of times before being retired, and has survived the wear and tear rather well.

In the part of North Carolina, USA, where I grew up, in years gone by, girls, such as my great grandmother, were often married at age 14. It was expected that a young girl would have 13 quilt tops pieced by the time her engagement was announced. Then her family and friends would get together to quilt them to create a lifetime supply of quilts, because once the young bride started having kids, there would be little time for anything more than functional sewing. That tradition had long died out by the time I was old enough to be dating in high school. It’s a good thing that the custom had faded, as my family would have been very, very cold, given my skill at piecing. I will probably never do another traditional quilt again, as I like applique so much better. However, I do admire the skill that is involved in created pieced quilts, especially ones with curved seams.

Have you ever started a big art project, gotten in the middle of it, and then realized that there was way more to it than you thought there would be? How did you deal with any sense of overwhelm that came up?

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