How I started quilting: a story involving pain, plaster and PBS

I broke my leg. On a dull, gray day in January 1990 I fell in a snow covered church parking lot while hurrying in to go to the funeral of the father of a friend. We were running late. Going anywhere with Mary means we will be late. Mary was 6-7 feet in front of me, and I was trying to walk fast, but not being very nimble (bad ankle already, and a deformed foot) not only was I not gaining on her, I was losing my balance. It's very strange, I remember that part very clearly. I started to tip, my right foot kind of dragging behind but stupidly I tried to keep walking, my right foot ended up behind my left one, and basically I tripped myself. I lie there on the packed snow looking up at the clouds thinking "just kill me now". It didn't really hurt but I knew I had messed up big time. Mary didn't notice a thing. And I would probably still be laying there if the ushers at the church door had seen me go down and came rushing out. They hauled me into the church, put a baggy full of snow on my ankle, Mary gave me a big dose of motrin, and then I hopped down the stairs and got loaded into the car and Mary took me back to kazoo and the hospital. Where I finally got a big pain shot and and, after a day, an ORIF.

then I went home with Mary. It being the smartest place to stay, my house being essentially impassable due to clutter. So there I was, one leg in a big plaster cast up on pillows, too fat and full of arthritis to be able to hop around easily on crutches and bored out of my mind before. I watched TV. I watched a lot of TV. I very carefully avoided the talk shows and soaps, there lay addiction. I knew if I got hooked I would spend the rest of my life as a slave to Phil Donahue. That didn't leave a lot (this was 1990 remember) and somehow, alternating between cartoons and mtv, I started watching public TV during the day time when the school instruction shows were on. It's amazing how pretty physics looks with animation and painkillers. Then I started watching PBS on Saturday.

Kaye Woods was my first quilting teacher. I don't remember exactly what she made, but I decided to give it a try. I sent Mary out for needle, thread and material. She was a little worried about picking that out but I told her blue, and she came back from joanne's with a pretty little blue calico and a white. Using a ruler, the household scissors, a pencil and cardboard temples, I cut cut a nine patched, sewed it by hand, and then quilted the white patches. I must have had a book by the time I got the the quilting, but I don't remember. i finished off my little ninepatch block into a cover for the hot water bottle.

Quilts! Quilts! Quilts! was probably the first quilting book I bought. I've always told people I thought myself to quilt with that book. And it's true. Most of the quilts I made my first 3-4 years came from it. I still watched Kaye and added Georgia Bonesteele, bought more books, many, many books, rulers, cutters, all the quilting paraphernalia. And material, which I had learned to call fabric by this time. I took one class. And finally with much trepidation, joined a guild.

the library guild was almost the classic cliche of little old lady quilters. It meet during the day, most of the members were housewives who no longer, or never had worked outside the home. It was small, never more the 25-26 members at it's peak, and very traditional. But they were a killer bunch of quilters and I learned a lot. And I finally could call myself a quilter without a mental blush at my audacity.