ME, BELLA AND THE EASIEST QUILT FOR BEGINNERS EVER

For the past two days, I have been incubating some kind of germy mess in my throat.  My body's army of immunity solderers has been attacking the enemy with the full force and use of cough, cough, cough weapons of germ destruction.
Hopefully, the chicken soup and green tea will also help.

Last weekend Bella, my eleven-year-old granddaughter, and I took on the ambitious project, which we found on "YouTube",  of making the "Easiest Quilt for Beginners Ever".   The notes written by the instructor, Paula, describing the video were encouraging.

"Believe me, this is the easiest quilt ever for a beginner to make. In this quilting tutorial, we show you, step by step, how to make a lovely quilt in less than a day. And the more you make the quicker it becomes."

And we did.  Believe her.  Besides the video had lots of views and plenty of thumbs up and only a handful of thumbs down.

Mind you, both of us fit perfectly into the "beginner" category.

Jelly Rolls

After watching the entire video, we agreed that it did look pretty easy.
So, off we went to Jo-Ann fabrics to buy, as instructed by Paula, one jelly roll, (twenty - 42"x 2" strips of fabric creatively rolled into a ball), batting (the stuff in between the quilt) and fabric for the backing (the back of the quilt) and, of course, matching thread.

I suddenly realized that before we even began to sew, we had already learned some quilting lingo.

As soon as we got home I hauled out, from the very back of the spare room closet,  my 15-year-old, but barely used, Husqvarna Viking sewing machine.  Which, at the time, I had to have because I was going to make all of this cool stuff.

After dusting it off, I set it up on my dining room table.

I took the cover off.

With one hand on my chin, the other at my waist, I stared at this strange looking machine realizing that I had no idea how to operate it.  And, I couldn't find the manual.

But, of course, this is the 21st Google century.  I found the manual online and printed it out.

Yikes! What?  Huh?  All those parts.

                                      

I did remember it had to be threaded by following a specific numbered path of  ups, unders and throughs and that there was something called a bobbin.

Threading the Machine

Bella and I walked around the machine, studied it.  We literally put our heads together, as we bumped into one another when we bent down to see exactly where that bobbin thingie should go. 

Forty-five minutes later, no exaggeration, we managed to wind the bobbin and thread the machine. 

I put my laptop next to the machine and we followed Paula's step by step instructions, pausing the video each step of the way. 

We sewed, ripped out, re-sewed.  We dropped the box of pins more than once and lost the scissors, more than once. We took a break for lunch and then another for dinner.  We pieced and batted and backed.  We crossed our fingers and hoped that when we turned the quilt inside out, the front would be the front, the middle would be the middle and the back would be facing the right way. 

Oh yes and we giggled a lot too. 

We, or I should say she, still has to do the actually quilting.  

Something else we learned.

"Quilting is the stitching which holds the three layers of the quilt 'sandwich' together while forming a decorative design."

I talked to Bella yesterday.  She said that she might leave "our" project" just the way it is. 

Last weekend Bella and I made much more than a quilt, I suspect.