Zoey's Quilt

This silly little thing is the quilt that almost ended my desire to learn to make quilts at all. I had put together a couple rather poorly done quilt tops in a nine patch design. Kiera's "sky" quilt and Jenna's baby quilt to be exact. Years ago I had completed a couple small quilts that Carolyn had graciously finished for me. The very first class I ever took was in an effort to learn to machine quilt myself. I had no clue how far down on the learning curve I was! And I left that day totally discouraged that I could ever achieve my goal. However, while at the class I ran into a woman I know as a customer at my job. She remarked that she didn't know I was a quilter and I answered that I wasn't and it looked like I never would be. About nine months later Joan became my and Kiera's quilting teacher. I made clothes back in the day, and so I had sewing skills, but the translation of those old skills into quilting wasn't coming naturally to me. The other day I was looking for all those quilting safety pins that I had bought at that class and discovered this awful little thing from that traumatic experience five years ago. It seemed only right to finish it, such as it is. And it is Zoey's quilt now, and is still the first one I have quilted myself. Because one of the first things I learned from Joan was about long arm quilters like Tomi. I took it with me when Kiera and her friends went skating last Saturday night to finish the hand stitching of the binding and she asked me, completely seriously "won't you be embarrassed to work on that there?" I said no that I've sat at the rink sewing before. And she said "well, you know, because it's so bad."
Yes, it is perfectly awful, but it's still a quilt.