What makes a quilter???

Ponderings....I wonder if there is a list of requirements for being a quilter? How did we get to the "place" where we now find ourselves? I have been pondering that question. It's as if a seed was planted or maybe just laying dormant until the conditions were right, and then it sprouts and reaches for the sun.
It seems to skip generations, flourishing in one, totally missing in another, then appearing again. I'm one of those. My mom was challenged to sew on a button. My dad patched his own overalls. I found out years later that my dad's mother had been a sewer and a quilter.

And then along came me, who taught my self to sew somewhere around age 12 or 13, was making my own clothes by high school, coats and all. I never looked back. Quilts didn't come into my visual range til I was in my mid 20's. and since that was the "60's", trust me..no one I knew was sewing quilts. I had developed a love affair with color and cloth. More was always good !

I became a mom at 27, with the adoption of a baby girl. I sewed for her from day one. But the only quilts I was making were squares, sewn together, and I was giving away my boxes and boxes of scraps to the church ladies. They made quilts for the missions.

By 1976, we had adopted our fifth child, and quilts as I know them now, still weren't on the horizon. And in the summer of 1977 my dad's sister visited us on our 20 acre small holdings near Green Bay, WI. My dad had been living with us for several years, so when she came, she stayed a week. It's a long way from Kansas City, MO.

Now this is a lady who never had children. And altho she approved of the way I was raising my kids, I didn't have enough to do. 20 acres, a huge garden, bees, chickens, feeder pigs, a horse and a pony, rabbits, and young stock being raised for beef....5 kids, a working hubby and my dad. And I didn't have ENOUGH to do????

"No", she tells me," you need something to do while you are waiting for the potatoes to boil". So she processed to tell me she would teach me to "piece" and "quilt". She went back to KC and sent me, traced off on junk mail, the template for Grandmother's Flower Garden. Pretty name, I thought. OK..I got scraps..lets do this. Her instructions were fairly simple..."Cut out a bunch of these, sew them together(by hand..thus the "something to do while I waited for the potatoes to boil") and then she'd tell me what to do next.

Somehow the "flower garden" part got left out. So I made a cardboard template and traced around it on my scraps, cut them out with a scissors, and began sewing them together. No one said "make flowers"...LOL..maybe it was a "daaaah" moment for me. But I did what she said, and after a few weeks, I had a very interesting shape going. Looked abit like an octopus.
That shape shadowed me for years and years as the quilt grew. I learned it wasn't hard to make the hexagon flowers and join them, but not following one color through out.

I sewed on this "thing" for years...taking it to my first quilt retreat in the early 1980's. Yes, this had been going on since 1977...LOL. Some nice ladies told me, "you'll NEVER get that thing to a square or a rectangle". Well, that was just the challenge I needed. I did get it to rectangle, with difficulty, and even managed to baste it and hand quilt it. Inside each hexagon, but it took 10 years...LOL..

I found out this layout is called Honeycomb, and isn't all bad. It's a wonderful first quilt story, and I have a fabric through the years encyclopedia on my bed. Pieces from people now dead and gone. Luckily my common sense told me about the seams...5/8" as in sewing was too wide, so I targeted what is close to a quarter inch. But not knowing I was suppose to use that. Oh ya.

And believe it or not, I have gone on to make two more Flower Garden quilts, and I chuckle as I made each one. And this is how I became a quilter...definitely reaching for the sun.