You can become an expert quilter. All it takes is quilting—just do it. So that’s what I’ve been doing since I have so much free time and I’m a homebody. I don’t like to go out all the time. I enjoy my home and I stay in a lot. And with the pandemic, you have no choice. But even on normal occasions, you can always find me at home. 

So I do like quilting, and I have engaged myself in trying to be very good at it.  I’m kind of on the slow side though– I don’t turn out a quilt every month or something like that, but I want to get better so I do spend most of my time doing that and a few things that I do otherwise I’ll let go of and just dedicate myself to what I really love, because I do love quilting.

A quilt is three things; it’s three layers: It’s the quilt top and behind there you have something called batting and then you have the lining. So that’s three pieces. They call that ‘the sandwich.’ You put all three pieces together and you quilt it. Some people quilt by hand, which takes a very long time. It’s tedious. And a lot of people— I will be one of them—will have a Quilter quilt for you. And that is a whole another phase of quilting; it’s a special machine that does it. You can do it yourself at home, but not as elaborately as you would if a professional quilter did it for you. So this is one of the things that I did.

Sometimes quilts surprise me, like when a secondary pattern emerges. Sometimes a V-shape comes out and I don’t always plan it. It just happens. I guess it’s something to do with geometry. When you put those lines together, they come like that. Sometimes you put them together and they all kind of blend and make a shape.

You can make the quilt as large as you want. As long as you have the fabric, you can just put it together. 

A quilt made from scraps is called a scrap quilt. When you’re sewing and you have scraps, you can bag up the scraps and use them later. That’s the kind of quilt I’m working on now. Somebody gave me all of those scraps, and then I cut them down and put them together and I separated them into groups of colors. And then when I sewed them together. I picked from one color to another color.  It’s very relaxing. It’s good for de-stressing because when you’re doing it, you’re having fun and you’re not thinking about anything except about what you’re doing at that moment. So for the time that you spend doing it, you’re really de-stressing yourself.   So it’s a good hobby and I think if you like crafts and stuff like that, you probably would enjoy quilting. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.