My oldest work in progress

 In 1990 or '91, I was fascinated by MC Escher and decided to make a tessellating quilt. The traditional T-block is a simple but effective tesselation, and I was drawn to it after seeing a beautiful antique quilt in that pattern.  

I set out with a collection of scraps gifted to me by an experienced quilter, plastic templates, a sharp pencil to trace around each template, cotton quilter's thread, bee's wax, and a booklet of number 12 sharps, which is what the older ladies at the little quilting shop near me (Bits and Pieces in Livonia, MI) said were the essentials.

I knew about rotary cutters and rulers, and I had actually pieced a sampler quilt with those new-fangled tools, but "the ladies" told me that to get good sharp points on my half square triangles, hand piecing and cutting with templates was the only way to go.

My Tessellating T's quilt moved with me to another state. And it was still in many small pieces when I met and married a man whose last name started with a T.  I used a few of the finished blocks to make pillows to "mark our pew" at church, but the quilt as a whole stalled as I became more interested in other types of quilting, had access to much more interesting fabrics, and life in general became more kid-centric.

Every once in a while I think that some hand piecing would be relaxing, and I assemble a few more half square triangles before remember that it's not all that relaxing.

In my current climate of getting things done, I revised the original plan and am on track to complete this middle aged quilt.  I decided to keep the 9 more pleasing and completed blocks and assemble them into a small wall hanging (40ish" square).  The rest I discarded without any pain -- they weren't particularly attractive fabrics and age did not become them.

Because hand pieced blocks are not necessarily at their best with machine quilting, I'll pull out my old quilting hoop and revisit my not-recently used hand quilting stitching skills.  Now that big stitch hand quilting is kind of a cool thing, I won't worry too much about my stitch per inch statistics.  Back when the ladies were instructing me, they put a lot of value on 8 to 10 stitches per inch and I did in fact complete a pillow sham with a chalk stenciled feather motif that was pretty close to that. I used a poly batting to get that kind of stitch density, and I'm curious to see what it's like to work with more dense and stable modern cotton batting.  I'm planning to do a little experimentation before I layer and baste Tessellating T.

Since I have a son with the initials T.T., I think this relic may have a future home.