New Quilters: Don't Be Afraid of Making Mistakes

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I recently wrote an article about washing quilt fabric and caring for quilts. This article was intended to prevent beginners from making the mistake of washing an unquilted quilt top. But I had a beginner reply and she mentioned that she was anxious about quilting and about making mistakes. It got me to thinking that maybe what a new quilter needs is encouragement to get started and to be willing to make mistakes. 

You will inevitably make mistakes, anyway. There's no way to avoid that. I still make mistakes because none of us is ever done learning! And we're also human. You can't let the fear of failure stop you from trying. Most mistakes are fixable. And the ones that aren't, you can chalk it up to the cost of education. That's what I tell myself. Think about it. If you had to pay someone to teach you EVERYTHING about quilting, it would cost a lot more than to figure out on your own that fabric can sometimes shrink when you iron it and therefore you should really iron it BEFORE you cut it out. Yes, that's one of those things that I learned through experience! And it didn't actually ruin the project. I just had to adjust my seam allowance a little to account for the change in the size of the blocks.

Now I want to show you something that's very dear to me. My first two quilts. I started quilting when I was about 8. I'm guessing cause I don't actually remember when I started. I started because Mum read the Little House books to me and Mary was making a quilt for Laura and I wanted to make a quilt too!

When I originally made this quilt, I didn't have access to YouTube nor did I have any quilting books. My only knowledge came from my mum, who is a fantastic sewist, but at that point, hadn't learned to quilt yet. So, when I initially made this quilt top, I used scissors to cut it out (with no template). This meant that the squares were not all the same size and they weren't even a little bit square!

I used a ⅝" seam allowance (cause that's what you use when sewing clothes) instead of a ¼" seam allowance and I serged the seams! If you didn't know, serging makes the seams bulky which can make it very difficult to quilt.

The first step was to unpick the whole thing, serged seams and all! Once I had it all unpicked, I decided I really didn't like the size of the heart appliqué. It was too big for the block, so I replaced that block entirely.

I chose a scrap of red and yes, I am aware that the bright red clashes with the burgundy, but I was trying to honour little Abbie's design choices! 😆 And then I designed a little hand embroidery pattern to fit in the centre of the block.

The next step was to square up all the blocks and make them uniform in size. I measured the smallest block, which was 5½", and then trimmed the rest to this size. And once all this was done, I sewed it all back together! It's been waiting ever since to be quilted. I'm thinking of hand-quilting it.

How do you think 8-year-old Abbie would feel about this remade quilt? I can't decide if she'd be delighted with the results or heartbroken that big Abbie didn't think her handy work was good enough! Maybe a bit of both? Actually, I think she'd be over the moon that I...or do I say 'we' when referring to my past self and present self both in the third person, as if she and I, or 'we' are different people? 😄 There's a brain teaser for ya! Anyway, that we or I or she finally learned to hand embroider! 

This one also had ⅝" seam allowance and was serged. I didn't actually take this one apart. I just unpicked the serged seams to make it less bulky. It was a little wonky so I squared it best I could without unpicking it. Then I added a mitered border and finished it with matchstick quilting and my mum did the binding for me. This quilt is up there on the list of treasured possessions. It just goes to show you how special early work can be. You don't need to be a pro to make something worth cherishing!

Anywho, the whole point of this blog post is simply to say, don't be afraid of making mistakes. Don't let the possibility of failure prevent you from starting. Do your best to learn from others and then be prepared to learn through experience! It really does happen to the best of us!