The Year of the Quilt

2013 was the Year of the Quilt.

Here's how it goes: I had a quilt I started in college. I shelved it for many years, and once I had possession of all my possessions (except the china, which I now have safely in my care) and some room to work in, I decided to finish the quilt. It's a jeans quilt. Only I was kind of short-sighted and put the jeans on the top. It weighs a TON! I was going to put jeans on the back, and had even bought the denim for it, but then I couldn't find the material anywhere. It turns out it's just as well, because otherwise it would weigh four thousand pounds and I would wrench my back out whenever I picked it up to have picnics with it. It is six revolutions of my body tall and six and a half revolutions of my body wide. (That doesn't show in the picture. But it does explain why it's so heavy...) I used ripstop nylon on the back. Not sure this was a wise choice--only time will tell.

I tied it. I spent many nights talking on the phone and using my great long needle and my q-snap quilt frame (thanks, mom) to put it together. I did my first roll-over hem on it. It looks kind of terrible, and if I knew then what I know now about quilting, I never would have done it that way. I'm still not sure that the ties, which I did inside, like turkey tracks, are going to hold up over even sort of any term. But I finished it. It's done. Hurray. I finished it...I don't know....in February, I think. So, from start to finish, it was at least eight years.

February was when I finished sewing all the pieces together for the BFQ, which I posted about earlier. (I took the summer off sewing, due mostly to needing to get vitamin D in me and also due to my living situation, which wasn't spacious enough to permit anything, really, much less quilting. I was so grateful for this last summer, though...many people were very kind to me, including my roommates, who made it until I moved out in October. Hurrah!) I began cutting out pieces for the BFQ when I was in graduate school, and I finished the BFQ in October...maybe November. I don't remember, and I'm too lazy to go back and check. So that was at least seven years that it took me to finish that quilt.

February was also the month that I began in earnest a t-shirt quilt, made of RRW's t-shirts. J came down and we had probably one of the most productive weekends I have ever had. We sewed and talked and cut and sewed some more and planned and laid out and...wow. It was a lot of work. I first talked to J about the quilt on August 7, 2010. Mom, Dad, RRW, J and I were at Wild Ginger, which is to this day one of my favorite restaurants. We were eating blackberry sorbet and I leaned over and told J that one day, if she wanted, I would make a memory quilt for her out of all his t-shirts. (At that point, we knew he didn't have long.) She started to cry and said it was a nice idea. I wasn't actually sure if she would remember, or forget about it, or if it would ever happen, but in February, the wheels started churning.

I never could have finished the BFQ or the memory quilt without my friend Peggy. She has a long-arm quilting machine and graciously let me come over to her house to use it. It was amazing. She is amazingly generous and was very kind and spent hours helping me and giving advice. It turned out better than I ever imagined it could. I finished today. It made me think of how much I love RRW, how much I love J, and how I learned to be generous, in part, because they offered me their generosity. It gave me much satisfaction. From conception to completion, that was just under 3.5 years. From beginning construction til completion, it was ten months. I did not believe it could be done so fast. It was the Fastest quilt ever...except:

I started V's quilt sometime in October. I guess if we're honest, I started it back in graduate school, since that's when I started cutting out pieces. But from the time I decided I was going to make the quilt until the time it was done, it was less than two months. I worked and worked and worked on that thing. I thought I was going to die. I had never machine quilted my own quilt before and I wished with all my heart that I had gone to Peggy's and used her machine. (She is so generous that I do not want to overstep my bounds...I thought three quilts in less than two months was just a little too much to ask.) I finished it just in time to send it off for Christmas. This picture is really horrible, but hopefully you can still see some of the prettiness of the quilt anyway.

2013 had literally more than a thousand hours spent at my sewing machine, probably a hundred hours of pinning, tens of hours ironing, and tens upon tens of minutes unpicking.

I would like to thank J for helping me lay out the BFQ; V, for secretly desiring something I made for her; Mom, for advice on interfacing and hours ironing, Grandma for the gift certificates, Peggy for lending her expertise to me, and to every single person who granted my offer (which were phrased as requests, but were really demands) to look at pictures of what I now consider to be parts of me, because they took so much effort.

I think in order to quilt you have to be a little crazy...the good kind of crazy...the kind where you want to make something beautiful and you just figure out how to get it done. I have so much to learn! I think I'm done with full-on quilts for awhile...but you never know.