So, as you may have read on my inspiration page, I love Angela Walters. And she has a really cool story about how her family gives away a quilt (or several) at their annual family reunions – at least in part to help entice families to find the time to attend. Family reunions were a huge part of my childhood. Each year my dad’s side of the family would gather at a lake in Arkansas and spend a week camping, water skiing, swimming, and (my favorite part) making homemade ice cream with my Grandpa Keith. One year we started calling these annual festivals “Camporama” and the name stuck.
As I got older, and the cousins started to go off to college and begin their adult lives, the reunions became less frequent. We tried another location for a few years, but everyone was just too busy to agree on dates and it just wasn’t the priority for a bunch of 20-somethings.
But now that we are all a little older and some of us have kids of our own our family is trying to bring back Camporama. We’ve had some sporadic success and for the past 3 years several families have joined, back at our old favorite lake. I think we are all a bit nostalgic about the Camporamas of our yesteryear and we want to make that same magic for our kids. I know that’s one of the reasons I came back. To be honest Camporama is little bittersweet now, with Grandma and Grandpa passed on, but it’s also an amazing time to reconnect with family and introduce our kids to some our favorite summertime traditions.
So, with the 2019 Camporama a few months away I began thinking about my grandparents, and how much I miss them, and how proud they would be if they saw us returning to our tradition. And you know I can’t think about my Grandma without thinking about how she’s inspiring my quilting journey. So, with that as a backdrop and with inspiration from my girl Angela, I decided to make a quilt to give away at Camporama 2019 this summer.
After going through my stash I realized that I had a lot of Americana themed fabric and I thought what would better capture the summer than an Americana quilt. I went through a bunch of magazines and found a pattern called “Summertime” by Susan Ache in American Patchwork & Quilting (August 2018) that I thought would work perfectly. Now, just to get it started.
Seams Right Quilting 