While joining me to collect free Row by Row patterns at various quilt shops in Virginia the last two years, my daughter became interested in quilting.
For multiple reasons I was all in, because quilt would help her with her vision therapy requirements of eye tracking and spatial reasoning with quilting!
Sadly, she’s struggled since no eye doctor diagnosed her until a few weeks before she started college.
After a year of vision therapy, she has come a long way, but the ongoing homework is principally spatial reasoning, which likely suffered over the years since her eyes didn’t track well.
Since she has a month off from college classes (a rarity) in August, she worked on a few little quilt projects.
Last year she learned a little bit about applique with this Umbrella in the Rain Row by Row, where each of us received our own pattern from Oh, Sew Persnickety in Haymarket.
After teaching her how to iron on fusible interfacing to adhere the pieces of her quilt, I helped her with the quilt sandwich.
Showing her how to baste the layers, I then showed her how to hand stitch the layers together, which continues to be a work in progress.
SMALL RAIL FENCE WALL QUILT IN PURPLES AND AQUAS
Suggesting she start a small quilt to machine stitch this summer, I showed her how easy the Rail Fence block can be.
At one of our favorite quilt shops this month, she chose some lovely batiks in an ombered-range of purples and aqauas for a small quilt of her own.
Showing her how to rotary cutting with special gloves, I taught her a lot of safety rules.
Since she has only used a sewing machine at the Colonial Williamsburg Costume Design Center while taking an 18th century pocket class (we used machines to expedite long stitches to learn three types of 18th century bags to sew), I gave her lots of review on my machine.
I thought that coordinating the use of the pedal while pushing the fabric under the needle would help her spatial reasoning skills…and ultimately help her with her driving, since she gets flustered managing too many things at once.
Since she had trouble eye tracking, I put some 1/4″ tape (purchased at a quilt shop) on my machine to help her keep her fabric strips aligned while stitkching.
Because she wasn’t keeping the strips straight, the seam came out crooked, and so she had to rip them out, which is never fun.
The tape helped, but she still struggled…and got tired quickly.
Eventually she had all the initial strips sewn together, which I rotary cut into squares for her.
In the header photo, she is arranging them into a pattern.
After sewing two rows of blocks together, she put her project away since it was time for college to resume.
Despite her struggles, her quilt is looking great!
