MY FIRST QUILT...subtitle(Before the Passion) I didn't know I wanted to be a quilter. I probably could have gone on with my life for years and years before realizing my destiny. In 1976 I had: one professional grade husband, gone, A LOT, 4 adopted kids age 8 to 4, a live in Dad with health issues and one heck of a schedule day to day. In very late June we applied for another special needs child, at WI Dept of Health and Social Services. We had adopted 2 "special" kids between 1972 and 1974, a daughter in 1973 and a second son in 1974. So what were we doing looking for another?? Good question, apparently I thought I wasn't busy. The long snd short of it, the agency managed to put a 3 month old baby boy with us in less than a month. Just about 3 weeks....believe it or not. Three months later in Oct. we moved to a farm in the country, 4 miles out of town. We had 20 acreas and were thrilled. We began to add livestock..chickens, rabbits, a horse, feeder pigs, young stock, bees, but nothing that required milking..I'm not that brave. It was a good year... 1976..*S* The following summer, my dad's sister came for a visit from Kansas CIty, MO. She spent a week. On her next to last day, she told me I needed some "pick up" work....now what the heck is that?? Well, it's what you "pick up" while waiting for the potatoes to boil, or the dryer to stop...I know I smiled at her, but inside I was cracking up with laughter.....I'm not busy enough taking care of 7 people plus myself and dogs and cats???? Apparently not. She went back to KC, and then sent me, drawn out on the backs of junk mail, a hexagon and a few directions. Mostly what it said was "cut out a bunch of these and sew them together, and I'll tell you what to do next". So, like the good niece, I cut out her paper hexagaon and looked for fabric to use. I had been sewing since I was 16, and I did make alot of my kids clothes, dresses, smocks, etc. And then my mother in law gave me a box of scraps. There were pieces of left over cutains and comforters,aprons some feed sack scraps,etc. I had quite an array of colors and prints. No one said "make flowers, made the center yellow and build out"..so I just sewed pieces together, by hand, eyeballing the seam, which are probably about a quarter inch....LOL. I can't say I love it.... sewing by hand or the look. But I dogged on, and on, and on. Sometimes it went off on tangents. I'd have what I would now(altho of all different fabrics) consider a "flower" made and then let one of the colors lead me from there. It occasionally looked like a squid or octopus with long dangley arms here and there. And by the time my aunt "told me more", I was too far into it to make real flowers, so I just carried on, and on. In 1980 we moved across the state, leaving the shores of Green Bay behind, and saying hello to the river that divides WI and MN. It was about as far west, from as far east as you could go. New job, new school, and by now I was doing new born foster care as well. The wonderful part of the move is that I was "found" by a quilter. My daughter told her daughter I was making this quilt, and she came to see me. Oh my, how she laughted. "You'll NEVER get that to be a rectangle" she said....wanna bet?????