Making Memories one quilt at a time ...
My mom taught me to sew when I was 8 years old. I started making simple clothes and eventually found the fun in piecing quilts. I learned to hand quilt from my Ma-maw. Ma-maw even took me to a few old fashioned quilting bees with some of the ladies at England Grove Baptist Church. Uncle Kent made my mom a set of wood, hand-quilting frames that sat in her living room for ages and we hand quilted there for a few years. (I still have those frames as a reminder of the fun times mom and I had quilting together.) I "progressed" to quilting on my dress maker machine - rolling the edges of the quilt from the sides toward the middle to where I had placed a straight line with painters tape. I would quilt down the side of the painters tape for a straight line. I couldn't drop the feed-dogs on my machine, so I was limited to straight lines top to bottom, straight lines side to side, straight lines corner to corner or straight lines around a square block. I found I needed to quilt in a new direction.
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I started looking at long arm quilting machines. It took me more than four years to evaluate, research, try, more research, more trying and finally deciding on a beautiful, APQS Millennium machine. Since the kids were grown and gone, the pool table in my dining room was exchanged for Millie Pearl in May 2013. For months before I purchased Millie Pearl, it was read, hand doodle, watch videos, hand doodle, over and over and over again. Once Millie Pearl got here, then it was practice, practice, practice ... over and over and over again. Finally, I quilted several of my own quilts, then Mary Nell (a very brave friend) let me quilt her first pieced quilt and No Thimbles got started. My love of sewing and quilting came together in a dream come true.
My passion for quilting, my reason for starting No Thimbles, is to provide a service for those heirloom quilts (t-shirt quilts, memory quilts, life celebration quilts, etc) with lifelong, cuddle-lasting quality at a cost non-quilters can afford.