I made my first quilt in the '90s. Well, I started on it in the 1996 and finished it 6 years later. It was an appliqued Sunbonnet Sue quilt for my friend Monica. I remember picking out bright (but coordinating) fabrics from the Calico wall at JoAnn's. I don't think I was even aware of quilt shops.
My next foray into quilting would be circa 2006 - two scrappy "Arkansas Crossroads" as Christmas gifts to mine and Dudley's moms. Again, I bought my fabric primarily from JoAnn's & Hancock's.
Soon after I came across some local quilt shops and quickly fell in love with Moda and other high-end lines of quilting cottons. And they were oh-so-coordinated! I bought a Moda Christmas Quilt Kit on clearance and I was so excited to create this perfectly coordinated quilt. And that was my M.O. for the next few quilts - I was in love with jelly rolls and layer cakes of packaged perfection.
But then those quilts started to look "too coordinated" to me. Too contrived. The results looked like something store-bought, not something personally sourced. So I returned to scrappy quilts and tried to find interesting ways to reconcile them with traditional block patterns. And it seems like all of a sudden everyone else was, too. I dunno - maybe they were always there and I just didn't notice them. But man, several scrappy quilts in and I feel like it's just more of the same.
Maybe this is how people get into those fancy art quilts you see at the quilt show - they've just exhausted all the other phases...
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