Craft No. 9: The Quilt

My sister has an amazing knack for always giving me awesome presents. From the baby bunny she picked out in the hospital gift store on Day One, to the Kate Spade bag that showed up under the Christmas tree a few years ago, she has a history of excellent taste and foresight. For her birthday this year, I pulled out all the crafty stops and – in the spirit of little sisters everywhere – attempted to mimic her prowess. So I made her a quilt.

I’d never made a quilt before, but my amazingly talented friend J. does it all the time - I got one for my shower! :) - and she makes it look really easy, so I thought, "How hard could it be?" Oh man... I tried to pick out fabric myself and failed - that's how hard it can be! So when J. came to visit this summer, I enlisted her help and expertise and finally made it out of Jo-Ann’s with 10 yards of (hopefully) Sister V.-esque fabric. (Picking out fabric for someone else is hard!)

Then I cut it into 2.5”x5.5” strips. Ten long yards of fabric worth. Whew. I ended up not needing all of it – maybe Sister V. will get a set of matching shams for Christmas - but I cut it all regardless. (First quilt, remember? I'm still figuring out how to estimate these things. ;) (This was also when I figured out that quilting is physically much harder than I realized. How do old ladies do it? My hand had morphed into a claw by yard ten. Now I get why they invented fat quarters and jelly rolls.)

Then I had to sew it. I wanted the strips to be random, but with no two adjoining colors the same. (Although a few did sneak in by the end of things. Whoops. I told Sister V. it had more character that way. ;) I started by pairing each color with a different color and sewing them in twos. Nora volunteered to help just in case gravity failed.

Next, I took each pair of strips and arranged them in longer strips on the floor to make sure there was no 'color overlap' with the rows around them. Then I sewed. And ironed. And sewed. And ironed. (Quilting always seems so charming; I never imagined it could be tedious. Next time, I need to set the ironing board up in front of a Star Trek marathon or something...)

Due to my own procrastination, I didn’t finish the borders before the river flooded, so I had to evacuate to Connecticut with my sewing machine. (Bert loves me. He evacuated with the sewing machine and the stray cat without a peep. ;) Like everything else, I kept the borders simple - no corner blocks - so it was just a matter of more sewing. And more ironing.

I ran out of time to drop it off at the quilting shop before I left for Africa, so I left it with J. with strict instructions to, “make any and all decisions necessary to get this sucker finished.” (She knows more about this stuff than me, so the quilt was probably in better hands at that point. ;) And when I got back two weeks later, it was done! And just in time for Sister V.'s birthday lunch! Ta-da! Success!

Whew. And now I can breathe. It was a fun project and I’m happy with the way it came out – the ladies at the quilt shop couldn’t believe it was my first quilt! - but it was a lot more involved than I thought it would be. I will definitely quilt again, but I think next time I might work on something a little smaller. I definitely bit off a bit much with a queen size. :)

And for your entertainment, here are some other things I learned about quilting:

Quilting is for math geniuses.

Sometimes I tell people the only reason I didn’t study engineering was because I couldn’t handle the math. They think I’m joking, but seriously: at Tech, architecture majors were required to take two semesters of geometry AND NOTHING ELSE. (Frightening? You betcha. More frightening? A good deal of those two semesters was spent making paper models of tetrahedrons – a useful skill in modern construction, let me tell you.) Let’s not even mention the fact that I squirmed through high school without ever taking Trig. (I don’t recommend this. It makes Calc a lot harder and Trig ended being one of those mystical things I did need to know later on in life.)

Since this was my first quilt, I didn’t even bother with a pattern. Instead, in homage to my trig-less architecture degree, I created a design I call “Running Bond.” (That is a joke. Running bond is a way of stacking bricks. It is also a really easy way to sew strips of fabric together and pass it off as “modern.”)

Quilting is not a summer sport. At least for people without AC.

Do you remember that terrible, no good, very bad week this past summer when it was like a gazillion degrees and 200% humidity? Yes? Well, that was the week I had to do a lot of ironing. It was like my own personal steam bath. Lovely. In the future (sans AC), I’ll save my heavy quilting for the winter months when the extra warmth will be more welcome.

It’s good to have someone on standby.

I’d like to give a big public thank you to my friend J. who helped me from the start, answered all my inane questions like, “What is binding and do I need it?,” and navigated all the quilting shop ropes for me. You are amazing!

Quilts are priceless.

In the past, whenever I’d price quilts at a fair or country store I’d go into something akin to cardiac arrest and think, “How could they charge that much for a blanket?!” Haha. My naiveness kills me sometimes, but I totally get it now. Between the fabric, batting, binding, quilting, and TIME, I don’t think it’s really possible to charge enough for a quilt. Maybe that’s why they make such great gifts!

I love my sister.

Nuff said. Enjoy! :-*