Geezer quilts

Dear Jaye,

Now that Janet is using my pile of quilt tops as long arm quilting practice pieces, I've been digging through the boxes and bins (and piles) where the tops are stored, looking for things to give her.  I don't have any problem with the fact that I had a lot of tops sitting around -- I like to piece, I don't like to machine quilt, and I can't hand-quilt quickly enough to keep up with my piecing; it's either be comfortable with all those tops being around, or feel guilty all the time, and life is too short for quilt-related guilt.  In the process of finding the tops, though, I've also unearthed several pieces that have been sitting around quilted, but unbound, for at least a couple of years.  (What's that about?  For some of them the binding was already made and was just sitting there with the quilt, waiting to be attached, and I do like binding quilts.)  That's where I found this quilt, which (sorry) beats your 1998 quilt in the geezer quilt category by several years:

Talk about blasts from the past!  I was still living in that apartment on Capitol Hill when I pieced this top -- and I moved out of that apartment in 1994, so it is at least that old. It's about 36" square because that was the largest quilt I could design on the design wall I had there.  I used every purple, orange, and yellow fabric in my collection to get to 16 blocks.  I had a set of design rules in mind, and one of those rules was that all the purple fabrics had to be different.  If I was piecing this today, I would repeat a couple of the purple tone-on-tones instead of using those two busy purple florals in the top and bottom rows.  Well, live and learn, and what I learned from this quilt is that sometimes you have to break the rules you started out with in order to end up with a design you'll be happy with.

I am pretty sure I have another UFO that is older than this one, but it's a hand-quilting project that I don't like anymore, and while I am willing to spend the time to bind a quilt that I don't love, I'm not willing to spend the time to hand-quilt a top I don't love.  So this will be the oldest piece I enter into the UFO-along.  Pretty soon all the quilts I enter will be quilts that were actually started in this century!