Today, I will share a bit with you why I began my sewing business. As you already know if you have read previous posts, I have always been inspired by my Grandmother’s creativity and wanted to learn how to quilt. I took a quilt-piecing class with my Mom and sister-in-law, but because of my busy schedule during tax season when I worked in public accounting, I wasn’t able to complete the class, and I never finished the quilt. (It’s on my project list for this year, though!) I pieced my first quilt in 2008 to give as a Christmas gift to a friend whom I knew would appreciate it, and Grandmother quilted it for me.

My first quilt. Pieced by me and quilted by Grandmother. Photo taken at my 30th birthday party.

For the next few years, however, my career and chronic health issues prevented me from having the time and energy to create by sewing and most of my creative time was spent knitting.
But then, a few years later, a lady who was my supervisor when I was a graduate assistant reached out to me to ask if I would use fabric scraps that she had saved from home decorating projects to make a quilt for her. I got the fabric from her and worked on the project at intervals. Finally, I finished her quilt in 2015. At that point, I decided to turn my quilting and sewing into a business and began Hearthside Comforts LLC in September 2015.

I made several more quilts for her, all from scraps of fabric. The next quilt that she asked me to make was pieced from an old bedskirt. At first, I didn’t know how to make an interesting quilt from one pattern of fabric, but I decided to cut it into strips and pieced it in this trellis-inspired pattern.

The quilting gave it some interest, and it turned out better than I thought it might.

Completed in 2016. Pieced from a bedskirt and matching fabric scraps.

The next quilt that I made for her was made with the same fabric scraps that I used for the first quilt, but I used a quilt-as-you-go method, using a nine-patch block pattern.

Because I was stitching the final seam of attaching the blocks by hand, the process took much longer than anticipated.

And here is the finished result!

The last quilt that I made for her was completed with only three different fabrics in various quantities. It took me quite a while to come up with designs that worked. And because I wanted to have an idea of how the finished product would look, I asked my husband to create mock-ups of my designs in Adobe Illustrator by taking photos of the fabrics and laying them out in the various designs. You can see those mock-ups below:

She selected the first design and here is the finished result.

On the first and last quilts that I made for her, I hand-embroidered a briar (or feather) stitch on the seams between the blocks to give more detail and interest to the quilt.

She wants me to make one more quilt for her daughter, but she will never see it because she is terminally ill with cancer and is currently under hospice care. But I sent a message to her daughter recently to ask her to tell my friend how much I appreciate the impact that she had on my creative endeavors. If she hadn’t asked me to make these quilts, I might never have started on this path as a creative entrepreneur…

And the winner of last week’s giveaway is Geneva B. I hope you enjoy your Blue Collar Joe coffee! And if any of you have tried the mocha recipe that I shared in that post, please let me know what you thought by leaving a comment on that post.

Quilts for a Friend