Some crafts are quick. In a single afternoon you can go from a pile a materials, spend a few hours playing with them and by dinnertime....a beautiful handmade object to be treasured for years to come.
Some crafts are easy to learn. In a few minutes, you can master a simple process, in a few hours develop a firm foundation, and days later you are sailing on to more complicated techniques.
Quilting is not one of those crafts.
Quilting is serious...and borderline masochistic. A quilt is not something one "whips up." There is no whipping at all..except for maybe the verbal self-flagellation one inflicts upon oneself while quilting.
Quilting is kind of like running a marathon...and who would inflict that sort of pain on themselves...only idiots...you know who you are.
My Ma (who I sometimes refer to as LA MADRE) is an experienced quilter. I think she might argue against this, since she hasn't had the time to complete a project in a while (this is partially her own fault because she is purist and refuses to take ANY kind of short cut and can never do anything the easy way...hence why all her projects look completely professional and unique) but no matter how modest she is, the lady knows her stuff. I've always known how to sew a little bit and now I'm not so naive to think that the art of quilting doesn't take a significant of time and practice to master, but roughly two years ago...maybe even longer...it was a different story.
I was foolishly inspired by a movie...that was my first mistake...as everyone knows movies and nearly everything about them...from the computer generated special effects to the leading lady's boobs....are not real.
There was a scene in the movie "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" where Jim Carey and Kate Winslet are snuggling under this beautiful brightly colored patchwork quilt made up of big prints on large 8x8 squares. I wanted to make a quilt like that.
So now I must search for the PERFECT FABRIC, because the whole aesthetic of this quilt hinges on the fabric.
I hunt on ebay (seriously this was YEARS AGO AND I didn't know anything about popular fabric designers) and I find some Amy Butler fabric but wait...this fabric is kind of pricey...and I want ALL the patterns...charm packs to the rescue
So I purchase said charm pack but once I laid out all of the perfectly cut beautiful delightfully patterned squares I (stupidly) decided I wanted the quilt to be BIGGER and bought a Heather Bailey charm pack...
Time passes...And I'm not talking weeks...Seasons change.
Once I pieced all the squares together I decided I needed some sort of border...after much deliberation...seriously major discussions and quilt book magazine consulting with my Ma...which went something like this...Here is a handy dramatic re-enactment.
Me - I want to do this wonky tilted bored thing (points at photo).
Mommy - Ok, that would look great, so you will have to cut each piece and sew them individually...(starts laying out strips) and you will have to be careful to sew them perfectly or the edges will curve and your border will be widdgle-y
Me - (hesitantly glancing at my now pretty decent sized quilt top..realizing I will need hundreds if not thousands of little individually cut wonky tilted slices of fabric) Individually?
Mommy - Yes, Individually...or (brightly, points to a page in a book of quilt borders) you could do this one! And THEN you could add prairie points!
Me - MA! There are like TEN steps to make every little piece of this border. WTF are prairie points?
Mommy - Prairie Points are these little like...flags you make by flipping the fabric like this and sewing here and here and here (demonstrates)
Me - (Eye-rolling into oblivion)
Mommy - yes, but....you just...oh...yeah this is kind of labor intensive...just pretend you will never finish and before you know it, you'll be done.
Me - I won't be pretending because I really WON'T EVER FINISH....How about I just sew some long strips together and slice those bitches into border sized pieces.
Mommy - That works.
I just pieced a simple striped border and it STILL TOOK FOREVER!
like I said...MARATHON...
OK...so quilt top is pieced! NOW the backing fabric! I found the perfect backing fabric at a quilt show in NJ I attended with my mom and some of her friends from work who are avid quilters and actually finish projects (Hi Sue! Hi Yvonne!). However, now the backing fabric does not match the size of the pieced top because I added a border. Mommy says I should just buy new fabric and use this fabric for something else...but I figured, "HELLS NO, I am not buying more fabric...this is like the $1,000 blanket! I will piece some leftover fabric from the front to the back and MAKE it big enough. We ARE IN A RECESSION for crying out loud."
So I did....now I have to put the top and the bottom together with the batting. This part was pretty simple. I pinned it all together and was getting ready to start tying it off when LA MADRE told me I had to baste it along EVERY DIAGONAL AND ALONG THE BORDER. I try to argue, "Can't I tie it off with the pins in it?" The answer to that is NO, because the layers will move around and the end result will be lumpy and we don't want a lumpy quilt now, do we?, says LA MADRE.
No. We. Do. Not. I basted that be-yotch to the nth degree. I even forced KiRa to help.
Did I mention that quilting seems to be straight forward, a list of simple steps. Follow steps to create a family heirloom to be treasured for years to come! They do not mentioned that every single step is made up of many SUB STEPS. Each step is really 10 different tasks. So each quilt is made up of thousands of steps, much like a marathon. According to the internet...2,000 steps average one mile...so a marathon would be like...52,400 steps...or roughly how many steps there were to making this quilt.
Also yes, I'm just tying this quilt, I'M NOT EVEN QUILTING IT.
FINALLY, the damn thing is tied.
I still have to do the binding.
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