The RIME Quilt

Back in the days before the Internet, there were commercial nets and echoed nets. RIME was one of the echoed nets you accessed through a local bulletin board. Those were generally run by computer enthusiasts and consisted of forums and conferences about all kinds of interests. There was a Stitching Conference on RIME and we decided to make friendship quilts. We each chose a pattern for ourselves, stitched up some blocks and sent them around round robin to be signed.

The blocks were sent around in 1994 and 1995. There was a hang up at one point. One of the participants held onto several of the packages and didn't send them on. But another recovered all of them and in the end my package came home to me.

RIME ended when the Internet became available. I lost touch with the other members. The quilt got set aside for quite a while, but a year or two later I did put most of it together. Most, but not all. Once again it got set aside, this time for several years.

Life went on. I changed jobs once or twice and then we retired and moved from California to Pennsylvania. I picked the quilt up again and found the pieces for the borders and finally put the quilt together and began to quilt it. I decided on hand quilting. At that point every quilt I'd done had been hand quilted and had taken years to decades to get finished. This was the last one. This is not an easy quilt to hand quilt. There are a lot of seam lines. It got put aside once again as Joe's illness got worse.

About a month ago I took it out again. I finished quilting the main part of the quilt. I figured out what to do about the borders and quilted those as well. And finally I got the binding on and finished that just yesterday.

So here it is. Another finished project. And that feels very good. But somehow, I think this is the last of the hand quilted quilts.

By the way. If anyone from RIME is out there, I'd love to hear from you.