My first quilt - where it all began

I thought for sure I had blogged about my first three quilts - but if I did, I sure can't find the post!
So I'm going to share a bit about each of my first three quilts in individual posts over the next few days. 

I made my first quilt when I was about 13-14 years old.  It was a wall hanging that I saw in one of my Grandma Scott's quilting magazines.  I loved it and I had to make it!   
So off to the fabric store we went to buy cotton-poly blend!  GASP!  Yes, that is what a lot of quilts were made from back in the late 1970's.   Okay - stop right now on doing the math to see how old I am!  :) 

As Grandma made all her quilts, we started with a cardboard template to draw the diamond shapes and I traced and hand cut each of them using scissors.   

And for everyone gasping that this would be a first quilt - Grandma has high expectations for everything I did.  No one told me that working with bias cut fabric and sewing Y-seams was supposed to be difficult.  

I still love this wall hanging, even in it's now faded way.  I love the color placement and the optical illusion of the 3-dimensional cube.   Maybe that's why I design so many quilts with secondary patterns and optical illusions today. 

And yes, I hand quilted it.  

And yes, my hand-quilting then was better than it is today!   

So the rest of the story on this quilt.  I entered it at the county 4-H fair and I received a red ribbon.  Grandma was mortified!  The judges critique was that I had used a decorative thread to quilt it with instead of quilting thread.  The pattern called for decorative thread.  I like the contrasting thread but the judge sure didn't like it!  

Remember this story for my blog post about the second quilt I made .....