Talk about a blast from the past . . . The Florida cousins are paying us a visit and as Barb was showing me a picture of her cats on her phone, my eyes went to the very basic, very loud, Roman Stripe quilt in the background. 1974 -- We are living on a lake in Odessa, Florida. John's Uncle Charley is getting married and John's sister Fay and I decide to make a quilt as a gift. Neither of us has ever quilted but I have a book of patterns and basic instructions. We pick out the Roman Stripe as being the easiest. . . Today, the color choices make me question my sanity and taste but, as I recall, we thought it was something the recipients would like, based on some other quilts they had recently bought. So we assembled a bunch of primary colored fabrics and set to work. This was before I'd ever heard of roller cutters and I suspect that we used cardboard templates to trace the many rectangles and then scissors to cut them out. The quilt was for a king size bed and it took roughly forever to make enough squares and then sew them together. At last it was complete and we layered it with batting and backing and wrestled it onto a homemade quilting frame hanging from the ceiling of our house. Several hours of novice (first time) quilting later, our progress was so minimal that we faced reality. If this quilt was to be finished before the up-coming wedding, we would have to tie it, rather than quilt it. So that's what we did and how we beamed with pride when we presented our gift. The marriage eventually ended and Uncle Charley is gone now but the quilt still adorns a bed in the house that our cousins inherited. It looks to have held up pretty well. But, my heavens, it's a gaudy thing! Even the cats won't sleep on it.
