Introduction

Hi there interwebs, I'm Kit. By day I work in law, by night I sing. Jazz, standards, 70's pop and a little Motown, I'm a cabaret singer, and for my whole life, my greatest passion has been to sing.

My second passion has been sewing and crafting. I sewed my first item (a dress for my doll modelled after one that Diana Ross wore in her Live at the Forum concert in the mid 70's). My mother gave me a fabric remnant - a beautiful blue flowered silk and helped me cut the pattern, which I then hand sewed.

That was it, I was hooked! Since then, sewing has always been part of my life.

Although I grew up with quilts around me, they never really impinged upon my consciousness as an art form. The quilts we had were sturdy, utilitarian, sewn by my great aunts and grandmothers, made out of old clothes and blankets, stuffed with pantyhose and rags, hand tied and used at the cottage for warmth on cool spring nights, dog blankets and the like.

Over the years, I'd made two charm quilts of the sturdy, utilitarian school that I'd grown up with. They were roughly sewn, tied and used for car quilts (in Ontario, in winter, a blanket or two in the car is always a good idea). I always saved my fabric scraps though, with a vague idea that one day, I would make crazy quilts out of them.

Around this time last year, I realized thatI had enough green scraps to make a quilt, and decided that I would do so. However, I took it into my head to make a "pretty quilt" instead of what I'd been doing in years past and I was hooked - line and sinker, my head filled with the quilts I wanted to make. But I knew I had to learn how to it!

With that in mind, I decided to make a number of mini quilts, whose end purpose would be donation to my local vet for the animal cages. I started with some chambray squares I bought at a flea market:

I had a lot of the squares and I made a lot of these quilts - mostly exactly the same, I just experimented with getting a feel for quilting. (Not knowing better, I was using polyester batting with a high loft - which I would never recommend for a beginning quilter now!)

From there, I decided to wing it, experimenting, trying to produce things that I had seen elsewhere, or just having fun trying new things:

Some things were TOTAL free for alls:

And some were more structured:

All in all, I made 25 small quilts for use by my vet - in dog cages, cat cages, for the small scales and in the operating rooms:

My favourite of the bunch was my first attempt at applique - fussy-cut characters from a zoo fabric:

All were a great lesson in teaching me very rudimentary beginer quilting.

Overall, they left a LOT to be desired. There were so many things I didn't know at that point; I hadn't yet discovered rotary cutting, the importance of having identically cut fabric squares, the importance of a 1/4 inch seam, I didn't know the first thing about machine quilting and was just sort of running the machine across the quilts in a really haphazard way.

However, I learned a lot from those early experiments, and more importantly, I learned that I wanted to learn more. So I went out and bought some quilting magazines and some quilting books and checked out other people's quilting blogs and began reading, reading, reading and becoming crazily, itchily inspired even to the point of dreaming of quilting even though mostly, I wasn't even understanding what I was reading; as an example:

Instruction: "Lower feed dogs"
Me: "Feed dogs? What the heck are feed dogs? I don't have any of those!"

I'm still reading and reading and learning and growing, but the one thing that has remained constant in this past year, is that my passion for quilting has not abated, and I believe it will be a life long passion.