In theory, I love making quilts. In reality, I just don’t have the patience to enjoy the process. I LOVE picking out fabric. I absolutely have an obsession with quilting fabric! I have collected A LOT of it. I love the beautiful colors, fondling the silky smooth cloth, oogling over all the different choices. You get my point.
Once you pick the fabric, then you have to cut it up. I am mostly patient with this step. Sometimes it can seem like this takes forever. And I mean FOR. EVER. Then comes the piecing. That can acutally be fun for a little while. You get to see the beginnings of the quilt and that can be super exciting. But, inevitably it either gets boring because it is all the same or gets frustrating because the block is too complicated. And then comes the actual quilting. Ah, the quilting. The bane of my existance. Not only am I terrible at it but it takes soooooo long. It causes me great stress. I have a hard time deciding on the quilting pattern. I am not good at free motion, so usually I just end up doing straight lines. And then those don’t end up being straight. More like wavy. Or maybe wobbly is a better term. Either way, it is not a good thing. Let’s just say that I am not going to win any awards with my quilting. Sigh.
So all of that was to introduce my current quilt project. It is a project that I started when my daughter got accepted to college. I wanted to send her off to school in the fall of 2014 with a quilt made out of her school colors. Blue and gold. In April 2014, I had a craft retreat to go to and I thought her quilt would be a great project to work on. Before the trip, I went to the fabric store with a shirt we had bought when we visited the school. I bought several varieties of the same shade of navy and one gold that matched perfectly. She had seen a picture of a quilt in a magazine and liked it, but it didn’t have a pattern. It didn’t look too complicated (it was just strips) so I figured I could wing it.
The piecing wasn’t so bad, it was monotonous and went fairly quickly. I mostly finished this step at retreat. Then came the “sandwiching” of the layers. I ususally just pin with safety pins, but have been wanting to try out the adhesive spray. It was definitely a process. I spread everything out on my garage floor and sprayed away. I was covered in it by the time I was done. I guess I need to be more careful next time. (Unfortunatley, I don’t have any pictures of these steps because all of this happened before I started this blog.)
But, for the most part, the quilting was okay. It held together pretty well with the spray adhesive. Here is the quilt while I was quilting it. I just stitched in the ditch on this one.
You can see part of the quilt rolled up under the arm of my sewing machine. This is a pretty small quilt (large twin size or maybe full), so it was not as difficult as it could have been with a larger sized quilt. My machine is small so it is usually very cumbersome and frustrating while trying to quilt the very middle of anything because that is when the most fabric has to be scrunched up under the arm.
Last row to quilt! YAY!!!
Now to cut off the extra batting and backing fabric to make a smooth edge to sew my binding onto.
I remembered I had cut strips for the binding at the retreat, but once I pulled them out I realized I did not cut nearly enough. I need about double this amount!
I didn’t have any extra yardage left over, so I decided to cut up the backing fabric that I just cut off. But it has spray adhesive all over it and I don’t want that on my iron, so I need to wash it first.
Off to the washing machine!
So that is as far as I can go today. I hope to be able to start on the binding tomorrow (Monday). My daughter leaves to go back to school on Thursday. I don’t think I am going to get it finished in time, but I plan to just ship it to her once it is finished. Hopefully, this weekend.
