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.
