A little more than 7 years ago, I made my first quilt. Well at the time I thought it was a quilt, considering it included everything I thought of as imperative to quilts – namely piecing.

As you can see, it was a pretty simple quilt. This was before you could look up thousands of how-to videos for everything, so I just made it up as I went. You should have seen me trying to puzzle out binding and mitered corners! But, at the end of the day, it felt great to complete it before my son was born. So great, in fact that it didn’t even occur to me to actually quilt it.

But, with that experience under my belt (and with a fair amount of mom guilt), I set out to make quilt number 2 when I found out I was pregnant with my second son a little over a year later. Getting this one finished was a bit more of a long-shot, given that I was working full-time and had a 1-year-old running around. But, I was born in the midwest, and no one does guilt like us. So, I got to work and knocked it out. As you can see, “quilt” 2 was essentially rinse and repeat.
And, nope, I still hadn’t figured out the whole quilting aspect of things. That light bulb was still a few years down the road.