Make@Zomboid.com: Quilting outside the box.

Saturday, September 5, 2009

Quilting outside the box.

It's September, and that means my mother's birthday is quickly approaching. Each year I struggle to come up with the "perfect" gift for her. Sometimes I manage to succeed, but my failures certainly outnumber my successes. This year my gift-planning process has been hampered by a severe lack of funds brought on by a number of different things which I will not go into here. :P

It's not life-threatening, it just means I have to be extra thrifty and creative when figuring out mum's gift. After a few weeks of stressing myself out and coming up with and then discarding a number of different possibilities, I finally came upon a solid idea: A quilt!

I'm not talking about one of those cute decorative quilts that some people make. I'm talking about a heavy-duty queen/king sized monster meant to be used like a comforter. Last year I made a beast of a quilt for Adam & I, and when my mother saw it she asked if I could make her one. At that point, I was totally over the whole quilt-making thing and I told her in no uncertain terms that if I ever did make her one, it wouldn't be any time soon.

Fast-forward to this July. In the process of cleaning/re-organizing my sewing area, I found that I needed to purge a lot of my stashed fabric. I didn't want to get rid of any of it so I decided I'd make us another quilt, because honestly, is there anything on earth that will use up more fabric than a large patchwork quilt? ;)

I did things a little differently than with the beast-quilt I made the year before, which helped to simplify things and allowed me to finish in record time. I didn't work on anything else during that time period and somehow managed to stay very focused as well.

Anyway, after realizing that quilt-making did not have to be so torturous, I figured it was time to give my mum something she had actually asked me for. :)

But by that time, it was already the end of August. Mum's birthday is the 28th of September, so I knew I wouldn't have much time if I didn't want to rush. By using a plastic square template and planning a simple checkerboard patchwork pattern (every other square is from a blue flowered print, and the rest are cut from a few different, random fabrics) I saved a lot of time in the cutting squares/planning rows stage. I know that I probably do not make quilts the way that real quilters do, but I don't care. I do whatever works best for me, and the quilts that I have made in my own little way have turned out pretty well and held up to a lot of wear and tear. I can't say that I enjoy making quilts, because I typically start despising the entire concept by the time I am ready to start sewing squares into strips, but oh well. :P

I definitely reached that point with this quilt as soon as I had finished cutting, sorting, pressing, and stacking all of the squares into row piles. For some reason I felt like I had plenty of time, so I took a break before beginning the sewing process. I was only going to "break" for a day or two, but before I knew what hit me it had been at least a week. I started to panic, because I knew I had less than a month to finish everything, and I knew that it would be very time-consuming (and I am atrocious at managing my time!). So I've plotted out a schedule for myself that, if adhered to, should allow me to complete the entire project with plenty of time to spare--even if I am slower than expected or just plain undisciplined. I've got a decent start on the sewing, and just need to keep chugging along now. Hopefully I will be done well before my planned finish date. Expect pictures when everything is said and done. :)

Labels: gift, mum, quilt, sewing