Quilt Camp Wrap Up

I posted a week ago about the eager-beaver quilt camper that I had hanging out in the sewing room with me! A week ago-- where does all that flying time go? I am SEW very impressed by this young lady's enthusiasm and focus when it came to creating her very first quilt that I can hardly contain myself. She and I chatted earlier in the year about her wanting to learn and I agreed to help her get started. We all want to pass along the love of quilting to the next generation*; or, in this case, the generation after that! 😉 At almost twelve years old this young lady definitely had in mind what she wanted to do; "make a quilt that she could put on her bed"; she arrived filled with the determination to see her vision through! As her quilt camp counselor I truly wanted her to succeed and decided that she needed a project large enough to be usable and small enough to finish, promoting a sense of accomplishment that might fuel her love of the art. We used the Accuquilt cutter and made quick work of cutting tumblers, enough (323 - 4" tumbler shapes) to make a quilt measuring 52" X 64".  She chose all of her fabrics from my stash, she likes bright colors and strong contrasts, no pastels for this girl! I taught her what I could and from there she worked tirelessly laying out all the pieces, creating her rows and assembling the top, hour after hour.

By Friday morning last week her quilt was layered and loaded onto Snowbird for quilting. She took a few passes following the pantograph, just to get a feel for the longarm, before we turned the machine on. She's a quick study and was done with the quilting portion by lunchtime!

This shot is worth 1,000 words!

She made her binding in the early afternoon and got that attached in short order.

She is shown here learning how to fold over and finish the binding by hand on the backside of the quilt. She's a natural.

I took this picture just before she left out the door to go home on Friday afternoon. She vowed to have her binding all finished and stitched down as soon as she could; "by the end of the weekend" she stated.

Her Dad sent this photograph from their home a few hours later; my heart swelled. Isn't this absolutely the very best we can hope for? For this quiltmaker I am not sure much else comes close. 

Yep, it's a WRAP!!

A quilter is born; I'm calling this Quilt Camp an unqualified success!

Life is Good!

* For what it's worth-- I've posted about this before, the subject of passing on quilt knowledge from one generation to another: When I began quilting I tried to learn every. single. thing. that I could from my quilting "fore-mothers". They were just as eager to pass along tips and techniques as those like myself were to learn. I found myself soaking in everything they could teach me like a dried out sponge in desperate search of moisture. This next generation, those the age of my children, seemingly need nothing from us. We are happy to teach, to give back as payment for all that we received; yet this "YouTube" generation have charted their own path, they're learning on their own and happily designing and creating by themselves. This makes me incredibly sad, on several levels, but the greatest might just be that very basic need to be needed. And, SEW it goes... thoughts?