Quilting a Year

  The first of the 12 squares for my 2020 quilt represents march, the first month of the pandemic shutdown. It also represents a picnic blanket: a place of gathering that became especially important when March of 2020 hit.  Everyone was caught in the middle of something when countries all over the world began declaring shutdowns that transformed our lives. For me, Covid hit at a time when I was starting to open up to the world again. In 2019 I had moved back to California from Philadelphia in the aftermath of a serious illness, which meant leaving my job, friends, and routine from the East Coast. I went through a period of recovering, physically and emotionally, from the ordeal. In the opening months of 2020 I was attending a coding bootcamp and I was ready to build on skills I had started learning on the job to make a pivot toward getting back to work with technology. It was both a program that was teaching me new skills, and a way to begin getting out among people again. In ...

This is a picture of a quilt that was started over 100 years ago by my great-great grandmother, and quilted pillow cases that I completed just this week as my first real quilt project. This "Quilting a Year" blog is about documenting the creation of a "covid quilt", a quilt made with the mask making fabric scraps of my 2020 sewing time ( read more about that here ).  But, since I've never quilted before, I had to start by learning the basics. Armed with Idiot's Guide to Quilting , I acquired some key tools: a rotary cutter, a handy cutting man with an ironing surface on the reverse, a quilting ruler, chalk marker, and a bunch of pins.   My very first project was a pair of placemats using flamingo themed fabric, and I learned quickly that quilting involved lots of patience and much more ironing than I imagined to make everything fit right and lie flat. I also learned that cutting a straight line is harder than it looks, and, despite my best efforts to cut out...