I started it back in about 2000, I think. It was my 2nd quilt. My first quilt was a sampler quilt that I pieced as part of a "Learn to Quilt" class at Austin Community College. Once I took the class, I thought, "Gee, I can make ANYTHING now!" and off I went to pick out a pattern and fabric. This quilt is from a pattern called "Stars and Bricks" and it has lots of stars with flying geese units for the points.
I was a bit over ambitious, to put it mildly. Looking back, this was a heck of a project for a beginning quilter. Anyway, off I went. I put almost the whole top together. My piecing wasn't super accurate (and to be honest, it still isn't) and I had to strrretch some blocks to make the whole thing fit together. So don't look too closely at these points, if you please. I also realized I had made a poor fabric choice for the background of the stars. The points blended in too much and you lost the star effect of the top.
I got kinda disgusted with the fact it wasn't perfect (this is something of a recurring theme in my life) and put it away. The top was mostly finished, but it lacked borders. Then I went to grad school and quilting took a back seat for a number of years. I dug it out last year and decided to finish it. I put the borders on and then it sat some more while I thought about how to quilt it.
I was smart enough to realize there was no way I was going to be able to quilt a queen size quilt on my vintage Viking machine. So off it went to Charisma of Charisma's Corner for her special treatment. And this was the final result.
I'm rather fond of it now, warts and all. It's got some lovely bright colors, and Charisma's quilting did wonders for reinforcing the star motif that was lost in the fabric selection. Even the back is pretty!
So that's the story of my first real quilt. It's kind of my life in a nutshell: tackle an overly complex project that's slightly beyond my skills, take a while to get it done, but finish it based on pure stubbornness.
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