Bangkok: My quilt story-part 2.

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When my daughter was at high school at the International School of Bangkok, (photo above) my husband taught fourth grade computer classes. One of the fourth grade teachers was a kindly New Zealand lady, Lorraine, who invited us for dinner at her flat, which was in a building next to our condo. She had a pink quilt draped on the rail at the top of the staircase, and I was smitten. I borrowed a thick quilting book from her and did not return it until after six months.

I found a pattern inspired by Italian tiles, and collected fabric from various shops for blacks, greys, grey-blues. In my eagerness to finish the first quilt, my templates were not accurate, the stitching was irregular, the fabric grain went every which way, and the colors were not properly sorted according to hue. Anyway, I did finish it and was somehow pleased with the results: but on close examination it would not pass any quilt contest. It is now used as a drape to keep the sun away from a room we currently use as storage.

Those were pre-rotary cutter days. Other quilts followed, learning the hard way as I went on. One of my problems was not following instructions carefully: I wanted to do more creative work (and fast!) which I thought was going outside the accepted norms. But there is such a thing as QUILTING DISCIPLINE: there are certainly basic rules to follow such as ¼ inch seams, following the grain while cutting block pieces, auditioning colors before making final decisions, pressing sewn pieces or blocks, using only colorfast fabric, iron the backing at least 3 times, with starch. So I went through the School of Quilting Hard Knocks. I still make errors but have become quite adept in camouflaging or making some remedy work for it or diverting its original purpose into something else , or kept in the Work in Progress box until further notice.

On a Christmas trip to Paris with my daughter, I brought along some cut pieces for hand piecing, a first attempt to fill in empty downtime with quilting. The flight delays accorded to poor weather conditions only gave me more time for piecing.

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