My First Quilt with Marlene Oddie

Did you blink and the month of March disappeared? Me, too! Fast as it may have been, it's the last Friday of the month and I have another first quilt story to share with you. This time Marlene Oddie is sharing the story of her first quilt.

Marlene (Baerg) Oddie is an engineer by education, a financial services systems professional by experience, a project manager by profession, and a quilter by passion. She believes in the KISS (Keep It Simple S______) method and has incorporated this into the company name.

You can connect with Marlene at her website, on Instagram, on Facebook, and on YouTube.

And now, here are Marlene's first quilts! First, one she made as a child.

And then the first quilt she made as an adult.

What year did you make your first quilt? What prompted you to make it?

As a child about 1978. (As an adult 2001.)

My neighbor said it was a right of passage to make a quilt so she took the time to teach me to blanket stitch sun bonnet sues and overall sams with fabric scraps from clothes my mom had made me onto muslin. Sashed it by machine and tied it with a Holly Hobbie sheet on the back.

2001...9/11 prompted me to consider my legacy...and my local church started offering quilting classes. After joining and making a flag from the scrap bin I quickly ended up leading out at subsequent sessions after the teacher was in a car wreck. 

What techniques were used in that first quilt? Did you quilt it yourself?

Adult: Machine piecing, including some strip/strata style sets to make the star field. I quilted a big star on the star field and in the ditch of the stripes. I tucked under the edges of the top and bottom and sewed around the edge. Not really any binding. But that is how we had done the "as a" child quilt in 1978.

Who taught you to make the quilt?

Child quilt. Velma Judson

Adult quilt...just did it on my own.

Are the colours you chose for your first quilt ones you would still choose today?

Not really.

Did you fall in love with quilting right away? Or was there a gap between making the first quilt and the next one?

Big gap! About 23 years.

Where is the quilt now?

I still have it. The flag hangs on my shop wall to show how far I've come.

Is there anything you wish you could go back and tell yourself as you made that first quilt?

Blanket stitch isn't the only way to make a quilt.

Anything else you want to share about your first quilt?

I'm grateful now for my neighbor who gave me a seed of inspiration that took awhile to germinate.

Thank you, Marlene, for sharing the story of your first quilt!

Quick Updates

This post contains affiliate links, which means I earn a small commission if you click on the link and make a purchase. That does not affect the price you pay.

I have just a few quick updates I want to share today. It's a pretty random assortment, but I wanted to get them all out there, so we're going with the randomness.

I'll start off with some sad news in the online quilting community, which you may have already read: Make Modern magazine will stop publishing new issues at the end of this year 🥲 I have loved Make Modern for a long time, and not only because they published so many of my patterns! They're not selling subscriptions anymore, but single issues are still available for purchase. Or you can purchase the All-Access Pass, which gives you access to every issue they've published (that will keep your quilty heart happy for a while!). 

Make Modern has been a big part of my journey as a quilt pattern designer and in the online quilting community as a whole. They'll definitely be missed. But they're not gone yet, and I'm looking forward to watching them spend the rest of the year celebrating their 12 years of quilty goodness.

Here's a throwback to when Stand Out Starburst was on the cover of Make Modern, back in May 2021.

And now on to my own updates! 

Registration is open for two Conquering Curves workshops happening soon. The first will be this Saturday, March 28th at 1:00 PM Eastern (10:00 AM Pacific) and the second on Thursday, April 2nd at 6:00 PM (3:00 PM Pacific).

During the workshop, we'll use my Noodles pattern (included in your registration) to sew gently curved blocks. I'll share all my tips and tricks for sewing pucker-free curves, which you can then use for any blocks with curved seams, like drunkard's path blocks or inset circles.

Both sessions will be recorded and the replay link sent to everyone who registers. You'll be able to watch it again while practicing your new quilty skill, or if neither session fits your schedule, you can still register and just catch the replay.

Register for the Saturday, March 28 session

Register for the Thursday, April 2 session

And for my last update, I've been sharing a fun series of videos on Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube. It's 30 days of Quick Quilting Tips and today is day 10. So far I've shared tips about quilt binding, colouring quilts with crayons, and more. If you've been watching the videos, I'd love to know which has been your favourite so far!

I've also created a spreadsheet where I'm sharing links to all the tips videos, plus extra resources that go along with them (like the link to my quilting binding tutorial when the tip was related to binding). You can get access to that spreadsheet here and get caught up on all the tips and the resources!

That's all the news around here. I've been cutting a lot of scraps lately, drawing lots and lots of lines for some stitch-and-flip flying geese, and just generally enjoying my time in my sewing room. I hope you're doing fun quilty things, too!

Cool Down Mini Quilt

Today I get to share the March Mini of the Month quilt! Every month in 2026, Stash Artists members receive a new mini quilt pattern and this month it's the Cool Down mini. If you're not a member yet, come join us!

I always say that if I weren't writing and selling my quilt patterns, they'd be known as 'that blue one' or 'the one I gave Dad' or something like that. Naming the patterns can be so much harder than designing and making them! For this one, I was drawing a complete blank, so I reached out to some friends for suggestions. One suggested Cool Breeze, saying the blue said cool to her. I loved that, but there are already a couple of quilt patterns out there using that name. Darn. I kept toying with different ideas and asked ChatGPT for suggestions, but everything I liked was already a pattern name, until finally I hit on Cool Down. Considering that was only a day or two before I needed to upload the pattern to the Stash Artists site for members to download, it was a relief to finally have something that fit!

Cool Down is similar to Spin & Sparkle (which was the Stash Artists pattern for May last year), in that they're both large pinwheels made of smaller pieces, but Cool Down is not just a smaller version of Spin & Sparkle. It was fun creating both and playing with different ways to make the pinwheels.

I do wish I had noticed that the grey plaid-like fabric used in the bottom left portion of the center pinwheel was so close in value to the black. I feel like that takes away from the contrast of the central, small pinwheel, but I didn't notice it until the quilting was finished. I wasn't about to take it all apart at that point!

Most of the fabrics for the quilt top came directly out of my scrap boxes, though you'd never say that to look at them. My blues are overflowing! Good thing my plan for the May full size Stash Artists pattern will be primarily blue (though that still won't be enough to empty this basket).

I used two different brands of solid black (Northcott and Island Batik, if I had to guess, but I'm not certain for either of them). I could tell the difference by the feel of the fabrics as I was cutting them, but you really can't see the difference looking at the finished quilt. I figure 'scrap quilt' means using the scraps I have, even when that means mixing brands of solids. I've done the same in Stand Out Starburst (black, again) and Pinwheel Irish Chain (white) and it works just fine.

For the quilting, I decided to only use back-and-forth lines, using Aurifil 50 wt in 2600 for the grey sections, 4140 for the blue sections, and 2692 for the black. I left the center pinwheel unquilted, which gives it a little extra pop.

As usual, I love how it looks on the back!

I didn't think I had enough solid black left for the binding, but managed to find a piece hiding in the back of the drawer that was just big enough to work. I was very happy to find it because I didn't have anything else that felt quite right for the binding.

Cool Down has a winter feel to me, so it really fits that I took these pictures in the backyard, where we still have several feet of snow. 

If you love scrappy and stash-friendly patterns like Cool Down, you'll love the Stash Artists membership! Each month in 2026 there's a new mini quilt pattern, every other month there's a new full-size pattern (6/year, usually with multiple size options included), and we meet to sew together over Zoom every month, too! Learn more and join us here!

Thanks to Yvonne at Quilting Jetgirl, I'm trying to remember to take pictures of me with my quilts more often. No one was home to help when I took these pictures, so I draped the mini quilt over a tree branch and snapped a selfie with my 'the sun is really bright' squint 😆