The Quilt That grew

Teasel admires the new quilt while I set up to put on the binding.

The huge [108" x 128"] quilt spread over the extension of my sewing desk and across two chairs, trailing on the floor.

Here it is finished and spread on our wide and high "lodgepole" bed.

Teasel is so beautiful. Her distinctive presence enhances the quilt.

Close up of the stitching pattern [free-hand] used by Sabrina, our machine quilter.

I was inspired last spring to create what a friend of my daughter would call a summer "outfit" for our bed. Customers often leave quilting magazines at the shop and I noticed this very simple pattern in one. The idea was to use up scraps of surplus fabric--something we fabric "collectors" always have. The instructions were for an 8" block. For reasons that now totally escape me, I decided to redraft it to 9 inches. I pulled out stacks of pretty floral fabrics and crouched on the floor for most of a long evening slicing strips of cloth. [I don't usually sit on the floor to rotary-cut fabric and can testify that it is NOT a sensible thing for an aging woman to do!]

I had about 2/3 of the blocks done--ridiculously simple--when I decided that I was terribly bored with the project. I stuffed the thing into the closet, then, several times, took it out, worked on it, decided that quick and easy "big blocks" are not what I really enjoy. When I began at last to lay out the blocks, I didn't like the pattern layout and added "sashing and cornerstones." By this time, the unwieldy thing was haunting me. During a fit of insomnia, I sat at the kitchen table, circled by interested felines, and drew alternate layouts, fed numbers into the calculator and thought I had a plan. The next sessions of stitching the long rows together made me suspicious that 2 a.m. is not the time for math-challenged quilt makers to plot a project.

By then I had named the quilt "Big Ugly". Gone was the conept of flower gardens laid out around a sunny yellow center, separated by paths--the way I had first envisioned the pattern working. There is about a 6 week wait while our machine quilter works her way through the projects signed in at the shop. I didn't have to look at the quilt during that time. I picked it up two weeks ago when she finished the quilting, put it in the closet out of sight until the "get it done" spirit seized me this morning. It took 2 +1/4 hours to apply the binding---that's twice around the perimeter of 472 inches, so allowing that I redid a few inches that weren't quite right, 944+ inches of stitching. The cats got tired of waiting for me to be done and curled up in the trailing wodge of fabric, disgruntled when I hauled in another length and they were spilled out.

In this house, no such thing as a quilt without cat hair.

I suppose since it is no longer summer a "winter outfit" for the bed should be my next goal. There seems to be a goodly fabric stash in waiting.