My First Quilt with Joanne Kerton

It's the last Friday of the month, which means it's time for a My First Quilt interview 😊 Today Joanne Kerton shares the story of her first quilt.

A self-taught quilter who has been quilting for almost 25 years, Joanne enjoys learning about design through quilt-making.  Her designs are a little bit modern, a little bit traditional, appealing and accessible to quilters of all skill levels.  She firmly believes that quilting should be a joyful endeavor.

You can connect with Joanne at her blog, on Facebook, and on Instagram.

And now, here's Joanne (circa 2002) and her first quilt!

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

I started my first quilt in late 2000, prompted by my brother's engagement. I wanted to give a wedding gift, of course. I also wanted to learn to quilt. Money was too tight to do both. What if I used the gift budget for quiltmaking tools and supplies? I'd learn to quilt AND have a handmade wedding gift for my brother and new sister-in-law. It was a perfect plan. It was rather more time-consuming than I had expected, especially while pregnant and running around after a one-year-old. The quilt was finished and gifted in 2002, a year after the wedding, but it was appreciated and was the start of my quilting obsession.

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

The blocks were foundation paper-pieced from patterns in a book by Carol Doak that I found at my local library. I traced all the foundations onto tissue paper. I think my husband helped trace some as well. I pieced the quilt in fits and starts, setting up shop on the kitchen table, putting everything away for meals then hauling the machine out again for the next sewing session. I finished the top a few months before the wedding, relieved that I'd be done on time. I then tried machine quilting, was thoroughly frustrated by it, and decided to hand quilt the quilt, resigned to delivering the gift a little later than planned.

Who taught you to make the quilt?

My friend Carol dabbled in quilting but found quilting rulers confusing. She assured me paper piecing was the way to go because cutting didn't need to be terribly accurate. She directed me to books at the library, and I taught myself from there. I used books and trial and error to figure out the hand quilting. I'm grateful the owner of the local quilt shop kindly took the time to teach me how to bind the quilt, because the books weren't terribly clear about that part!

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

I still like the colours, but I would probably vary the scale of the prints more today. I also would probably choose a block background with some texture instead of a true solid.

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

I have had at least one quilt in progress since that first one, though in the early years the production rate was very slow, on the order of one finish every couple of years.  Quilting edged out other crafts very quickly.  To be fair, my toddler had a close encounter with a knitting needle that could have turned out very badly, so knitting needles disappeared for a while.  Without that incident, knitting might have edged out quilting, or competed for equal time.

Where is the quilt now?

I'm fairly certain my brother and sister-in-law still have it.  I saw it on the back of their living room couch during a visit a couple of years ago.

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

First, check the block placement!  I had a layout planned to alternate block patterns and colors.  Somewhere along the way I messed it up and didn't notice until after the whole thing was quilted.  Seeing the blocks in the "wrong" place still bothers me, more than 20 years later.  How on earth did it not bother me enough to notice before I started the quilting? 

Second, no one else will see or care about your mistakes.  Do your best, but don't obsess about perfection.   I think we are all our own worst critics.  Those blocks in the "wrong places"?  Paul and Shona don't care!  At least they've never said so...

Anything else you want to share about your first quilt?

It was really, really hard to give it away!  It was always meant as a gift, but I was so proud of that first effort that I very nearly kept it for myself. 

Thank you for sharing your first quilt with us, Joanne! I think we can all relate to wanting to keep an intended gift quilt for ourselves 😆

You've Got This! and TGIFF

Welcome to the Thank Goodness It's Finished Friday party 🎉 I have a small finish to share this week.

A friend is battling breast cancer. Thankfully it was caught early at a routine mammogram (consider this your reminder to schedule those routine medical checks!), so her prognosis is good. Still, 2025 has been "a ride," as she put it. I decided to make her a mini quilt I'm describing as a fist bump in quilt form for when she needs it.

I was on a roll making this little mini, so much so that I was almost finished the quilting before I realized I hadn't paused to take a single picture. Oops! 

Orange is her favourite colour, so I coloured the text with orange crayon. I have a tutorial here for how to do that. It's a quick and easy way to add text to a quilt.

Then came the fun part - quilting it! I started by outlining each letter with Aurifil 1133 (Bright Orange).

Then I used Aurifil 1133, 2390 (Cinnamon Toast), and 2135 (Yellow) to add some freehand flowers. They're all perfectly imperfect, just like real flowers. I didn't really plan out their placement, I just started adding them and stopped when it felt like there were enough. Then I finished off the quilting with a dense stipple in Aurifil 2024 (White).

I usually use a solid for the back, but went with this fabric from Island Batik for its oranges, instead. I also added a couple of folded triangles at the top in case she wants to hang it.

When putting on the binding, I must have been distracted. I usually put it on the back first, then fold it over to the front and stitch it down by machine. You can see my full machine binding tutorial here. This time, I put it on the front first, then had to fold it to the back. Last time I did that (a couple of years ago), I hand stitched the binding to the back. I really didn't want to do that this time, though, so I clipped the binding in place all around the quilt and stitched at the edge of the binding from the front, hoping to catch it on the back. It worked, except where it missed a little bit at the bottom. Since it's just a mini quilt, I declared that to be good enough!

I can't do anything about the medical side of things for my friend, but hopefully this quilted fist bump reminds her that she's strong. 

That's my finish this week. What have you finished lately? Link it up below, then be sure to visit some of the other links and celebrate their finishes, too!

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Strong Enough?

Devotion for the week...

Have you ever watched an adult arm wrestle a preschooler? When the adult inevitably loses, it's obvious to everyone except the preschooler that the adult lost on purpose. The preschooler, though, thinks they were strong enough to overpower the adult and gets so excited about their win! This past week, as we approached Easter, that image was all I could see when I thought about Jesus going to the cross.

Jesus wasn't surprised by the cross. He wasn't ambushed and dragged there unwillingly. He wasn't fighting to get free or resisting in any way. His death on that cross was planned ahead of time and He was simply following the plan. He even told Pilate, "You would have no power over me at all unless it were given to you from above" (John 19:11).

Satan, though, didn't know about the plan. He didn't understand the power of God, so he thought he was overpowering Jesus. Can you imagine how excited he was when Jesus died on the cross? How he must have celebrated God's defeat? He actually thought he had outmaneuvered the omniscient God! 

But then came the moment of truth. As Peter explained in his sermon to the crowd on the day of Pentecost, "God released [Jesus] from the horrors of death and raised him back to life, for death could not keep him in its grip" (Acts 2: 24). Death wasn't strong enough to hold Jesus! 

Satan thought he had defeated Jesus on that cross, but in reality, Jesus had let him win. Then, while Satan was likely still celebrating, God revealed His true strength as He raised Jesus back to life, claiming the ultimate victory.