Quilting as Creativity

You may have noticed I’ve made less blog posts this past few months. One reason is that I’m wintering in one place, not moving around, so I’ve got less new scenery to aim my camera at. The other reason is that I’ve been funneling my creativity into quilting projects.

Bob’s Quilt

I decided to challenge myself with making a king-size quilt from a pattern named “Yellow Brick Road” that I found in Lancaster, PA. My friend, Peg, helped me pick out fabrics/colors and a small sewing machine because no way was I going to hand-sew a huge quilt! When I settled into my winter condo, the work began. It did feel like I was cutting fabric for days. Oh, wait, I was!

tbd

After all the cutting was done, the piecing began. As you can see by my notepad, I had to track three different kinds of squares and make a total of 150 of them. I did wonder about my sanity about halfway through this phase. When the squares were done, it was time to assemble them into rows. Good thing the winter condo has a king-size bed because I needed every inch of it to lay out my design.

Two additions to my winter arsenal of quilting tools were a full-size iron and ironing board. So handy. At each step of the quilt-making, it’s important to press the seams flat. And then, at the end, the ironing board helped hold the fabric as I cleaned up the loose threads and got it ready to send to the long-arm quilting service for assembly.

Next stop: Lancaster, PA and the long-arm quilting services of Guided Star Quilting. Starla assembles the front, the quilt batting in the middle, and the backing fabric, then sets it up on her huge machine, selects the pattern, and the fun begins. She sent me this photo when it was done so I could anticipate getting the almost-finished product back in a few day’s time. Isn’t it beautiful? That quilting pattern absolutely made the quilt.

The last step was to bind the edges. In the photo above, you can see the border just kind of ends and the quilt batting sticks out beyond it (by design). Binding means cutting off that excess batting, squaring the quilt one last time, and then sewing a nice binding. I made the binding out of the same material as the border, so it’s a bit hard to spot in the photo below. Here’s the finished quilt, ready to be shipped off to its new home in Colorado.

Lap Quilts

Much smaller, and much easier, these are the ones I’m having fun with this winter, using the time to practice my cutting, seaming, and joins. All of which need practice because good quilts are about accuracy in all three areas. I made two lap quilts for my brother and sister-in-law, who live in the frozen wilds of Wisconsin. My timing was perfect, the package of quilts arrived just as their latest cold snap kicked in and so they were well-used in that first week.

This is the first of the two quilts, batik fabrics in blues and greens because my sister-in-law and I both like those colors a lot.

The second quilt was all shades of blue, also batiks, so that the two quilts kind of coordinate without being the same or being so different that they’d clash when used side by side. And I have to say batiks are good fabrics to machine sew with, as they rarely ravel the way other cotton fabrics can.

Baby Quilt

I went one size smaller after the lap quilts, sewing a baby quilt for friends’ new grandson up in Maine. I figure it will be fun either side, and in a crib or as a floor mat. This was my first baby quilt and I learned a lot about fabric selections and sizes, as well as binding. I did do this binding as a learning exercise before I did the binding on Bob’s quilt, because I needed to practice and to figure out things like corners on an easy-to-sew piece. This quilt was only 48 inches x 55 inches, compared to the king-size quilt, which was 120 inches x 120 inches, so way easier to figure out binding on this smaller quilt before moving up to the big boy.

Right now, I’ve got another quilt for me underway and another lap quilt in progress, which I’m using to practice machine-quilting with my new machine, a computerized Singer model that is so much nicer and easier to sew with. It’s got a lot more bells and whistles, but so far I’ve just been straight-stitching. This machine gives me a lot of room to grow, just look at all those stitching options!

I’ve got a Spring quilt project picked out that I can do by hand as I travel around in March and April, without needing to break out the sewing machine. I like hand-sewing, it’s very soothing and almost meditative for me, so I’ll keep doing it as long as my hands hold out.

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Quilting is cheap therapy. 

Anonymous (but probably a quilter…)