Work in Progress

Here is my newest big project, the Imagination Quilt from Free Spirit Fabrics and Tula Pink. This quilt is going to be beautiful, and I will make sure to update as I go along. Each of these little blocks is made up of 11 pieces! And there is going to be 200 of them!!!! This is a foundation paper piecing project, which means that I am kind of using fabric to “paint within the lines”, it allows for sharper points and more intricate designs to be done with fabric. This quilt, when I am done with it, I intend to enter it into the Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival in Hampton, VA, and the A Mountain Quilt Fest in Pigeon Forge, TN, and maybe a few others that I find. I am hoping this beauty might get some good attention.

Update: This quilt top is now done!!! Here is this finished top, just waiting on the backing to come in the mail to start quilting.

Not JUST a Quilt…

To me, as a quilter, a quilt is never JUST a quilt. For me I see what it will become when it’s longer with me. If it is a kids quilt I see them cuddled up on a cool day keeping warm, or laying under it when they are sick and home from school. I see the fort or cape it becomes when their imaginations run wild. I see the picnic on a beautiful day outside, or the picnic on a rainy day inside. I see the comfort it can bring to someone who has had a loss, the memories it can hold, or the memories it can make. I can see the warmth it will bring on a rainy day in fall, on a cold and snowy day in winter, or even the air conditioned summer day inside when you just want to snuggle. I can see it’s comforts lasting for generations, being passed down for decades so that others might know it’s comfort.

So for me it is not JUST a quilt, it’s not JUST a blanket, it is a memory, a comfort, and a lifelong friend.

Christmas Family Quilting

So with the outset of 2020, and the craziness of the pandemic, I got way more into my quilting. I went from working in an office and commuting 45 minutes to and from work everyday to getting to work from home, which was amazing, and gave me a lot of time to hone my skills.

About 3 months into working from home I decided that I wanted to make quilts for all the kids (my nieces and nephews) and my parents and in-laws, for Christmas. I started trying to figure out what would be the best thing to make, and I decided to try my hand at memory quilts, with photos. I used my oldest sons as the test, and bought some photo fabric and started trying to narrow down the million or so photos I had of him from the previous year and a half. I found some great inkjet photo fabric and started printing like crazy!

After the photos for my little guy came out ok, I solicited for photos from my brother and sister for their kids so that I could do the same for them. For my parents I got some photos from them, but also from my archives and that of my brother and sister, there was a lot of sifting to find good ones that would print well on the fabric. I think I ended up spending more time finding the photos and printing them than it ended up taking me to sew them all together.

These were definitely some of the most fun quilts for me to do. They were simple and yet complex. I made them so that each photo had a frame around it, and then for the actual quilting I was able to do a different design for each frame. It allowed me to be very creative on how to make it all flow together while making each photo unique. Being that not all of the photos were the same size, I got to be creative with each frame and got to flex my quilt math skills to make them all fit together.

These photo memory quilts are definitely a unique challenge, but so worth the time and effort that went into making them. I think they came out pretty amazing.

Making Good as New

As about a year and a half ago, an old friend of mine that knew I was into making quilts asked me to take a look at a few old quilts that her grandmother had made for her, to see if I could repair some of the wear and tear that time had wreaked on them. These were definitely a challenge. It is one thing to make a quilt from scratch, but repairing an old quilt, or in this case 2 of them, back to their glory, while keeping them as original as possible, is a completely different story.

One of the quilts was easy enough to return to its former glory, the threads of the quilting had just gotten worn out, there weren’t any holes or anything in the top or the backing, and the batting was actually in pretty good shape as well. The second quilt however, was in much more dire straights, there were a few major holes, the binding was worn out, and the batting was completely shot.

This was by far one of the most difficult projects I have taken on. Taking fresh fabric and making a quilt from scratch, while not necessarily the easiest thing in the world to do, is so much easier than trying to repair an old quilt, especially when there are holes involved. Restoration takes a very delicate hand.

Introduction to… well, me…

Hello, my name is Elizabeth Becerra, or Liz for short. I have never done anything quite like this, but here goes nothing… A little bit about me and how I got started in quilting:

I am a mom of 2 young boys (I love being a boy mom!!!), they are a handful, but I love how goofy and amazing they both are. Right now my oldest, Tony, is 2.5 years old, and my youngest, Baylor, is only 3 months old. My background is that I went to a crazy technical school, called RPI, and got my BS in Civil Engineering, from there I went into the U.S. Navy as an officer for about 4 years, so didn’t get to use my degree much, but learned a lot along the way and got to see some pretty cool parts of the world. Since getting out of the military a little over 5 years ago, I married my amazing husband, Martin, he has truly been my rock and has supported my crazy hobby of quilting as well as being an awesome dad to our little guys.

While I was growing up I never really did any sewing, my grandma was an amazing seamstress, but I never got to learn how to sew from her because my family moved due to my parents jobs, so we were pretty far away. I didn’t really pick up sewing until college. I had done small things, like repairing clothes, putting buttons on, hemming pants, that kind of thing, but I had never made something until my senior year of college. I found a pattern at a quilt shop near where my parents lived, and decided I just had to make it. The pattern was puzzle pieces, and I love puzzles. I didn’t have a sewing machine, or even most of the basics for making a quilt, like a cutting mat, rotary cutter, templates, rulers, nothing! So I went out and got a small cutting mat, a ruler, some fabric scissors, and a rotary cutter, as well as some template making material. I really had no idea what I was doing when I first started, I was totally winging it!

I ended up making a queen size quilt top, sewing it all by hand! And I made soooo many mistakes along the way and made it much harder than it needed to be, but I learned a lot from the experience. I certainly realized that I knew nothing about making a quilt, but I did it anyway, despite not knowing what I was doing, and it came out looking pretty good, if I may say so myself.

When I finished the quilt top I took it to a local long arm quilter (which I had no idea what a long arm quilter was at the time), and she was asking me how I want the quilting done, what I wanted for backing and batting, and what I was going to use for the binding… I actually had to ask her what she meant by binding, I had no idea what what she was talking about, and I had to ask her to do it for me since I didn’t own a sewing machine (I know many people do theirs by hand, but after doing the whole top by hand I did not feel like doing the binding by hand too).

This quilt was my first foray into quilting, and would be my last for a very long time… about 2 years ago, around when my first son was born, I decided to buy a sewing machine, mostly because it was on sale, and I wanted to make a baby blanket for Tony, from there I just kept getting more and more into it, and now here I am, I have made so many quilts at this point, I still make mistakes, and I am far from perfect, but I love it.

I see it kind of like construction (yay finally using my degree for something!…kind of… sort of… ok not really), to me its about taking the raw materials (fabric, thread) and using forms, templates, rulers, and patterns (plans and drawings) to construct a final product. It isn’t a building or structure, but it has some of the same elements of such, uses some of the same techniques (making sure it is square, that all the pieces fit together, ensuring it isn’t going to fall apart), and takes a lot of materials and planning to make sure it turns out as it is supposed to.