Quilting with Miss Piper

After a little conversation with my granddaughter Piper about her learning to quilt on my smaller longarm quilting machine, she was excited to try it. There happened to be a quilt show I like to enter coming up and they have a category for kids. I love this show, how it is run, the educational opportunities, and the people that run it.

Piper had her first chance on the longarm for quilting in July for our local quilt show, making a small wallhanging she constructed and quilted while sitting on my larger machine. By the expression on her face while quilting, I knew she loved it.

She and I decided her next quilting experience would be a pantograph on a quilt top I made last fall that is colorful and fun. She would have to follow a red dot laser on a simple paper pattern design. I felt it would give her more confidence in the machine and control deciding how to move, learning to control her speed and doing the best job she could.

She nailed it.

I want to say Piper just turned 8 the end of June this summer. She is a tall girl, but still a little girl with a short attention span, and prefers to play Minecraft, and watch SpongeBob. Pink is a fashion mainstay for her.

My main goal was to be patient with her, have the quilting sessions broken up into short time frames, and keep it fun but serious. On the serious side, I set up one row wrong for her and after she quilted the entire row, I realized I had to tear it out and have her redo it. This showed her 5 minutes of her quilting took me 30 minutes to tear out the goof.

Today Piper colored her custom label for her quilt. At the beginning of this project she declared the quilt would be given to one of her girlfriends for Christmas. Piper is a sweet girl with a huge heart of kindness.

Our next plan is for her to continue learning pantograph control by working on a Quilt of Valor next. She already knew I made them and has accompanied me when I've dropped them off at the local Veterans Office. It will be her turn to gift it to the office and enjoy the feeling of doing a good thing for a veteran.