My Quilt Block

Quilting is part of my Orton family heritage. A large part, although I didn't realize it until just the last few years. My mother has always bee passionate about sewing, but it's always been for clothing. Never quilting. My Aunt is an avid quilter, and my grandmother was as well. My great aunts quilt, as did my great- grandmother.

A couple of years ago, my Aunt tried to harness our sewing talents at a family reunion by organizing a humanitarian quilt drive. Everyone that wanted to was to make and bring as many baby quilts as they could to the family reunion where we would tie them as a reunion activity. My mother and sisters and I jumped in head first into this project and had such a great time. My mother even had some old quilt squares of my Grandmother's that we got out and tried to use. Mattie Rae even got her own sewing machine and made some beautiful quilts of her own!

The Orton women are my most favorite people in the world. They are wise, inspiring and uplifting to be around. We get together once or twice a year just to enjoy each other. Last fall at our Orton girl cousin get-together, my cousin, Daunell, brought up the idea of doing an Orton Heritage Quilt to help with the winter doldrums. She suggested a quilt block exchange and at the next cousin get together we'd swap blocks and each have an identically unique quilt once we put it together. She assigned a color scheme, size, and number of blocks and left it up to us to find a pattern that would represent us.

I chose a simple pattern because I don't have a lot of quilting experience, and with Braxton's wedding put it off and put it off. The wedding is now over and it's time to focus on the quilt blocks. I've been uneasy about the pattern I chose because it doesn't necessarily represent me, nor is it unique. After some brainstorming, sketching, cutting, and sewing, I came up with this as my sample block.

I have since washed it an ironed it and the edges of the flowers lifted and frayed, just as I hoped they would. I chose to depict flowers to represent that I studied Floral Design in college. I love it and am much happier about this representing me than the plain old generic block that I originally chose. To some it may look simple, but I'm pretty proud of it. The colors we were supposed to use were dark blue, dark red, and soft white. Hopefully the green won't be too distracting. I've got to make 24 more. I've got a lot of circle cutting ahead of me!