Birth of a Quilt

THE BIRTH OF A QUILT

Week one of Stay At Home

I have been toying with the idea of documenting a quilt build from beginning to end, but I have not taken pictures of much of my progress.

I try to be organized when I sew; it helps my mental health immensely to have neatness in my sewing room.

I should start at the beginning of my quilt in this little missive.

I have an AccuQuilt GO fabric cutter and I love it. I bought a lot of dies of shapes that are difficult for me to accomplish because of angles that don’t translate to sewing well. Something I call long legged stars is one. It is actually labeled as a triangle in a square. The die cuts have the corners cut off and when you sew, the pieces go together perfectly because of the flat corners. Flying geese is another block that I can do well with all the ways you can make a flying goose, but the die cut pieces just fall into place and practically sew themselves.

The quilt I am documenting started out as an idea of colors that I have never worked with in a group. Pinks, oranges, yellows and purples came to me in a customer quilt and I fell in love with the look. I like almost all of the colors singularly, but I don’t especially care for pink. I don’t make quilts with pink, and the only one I ever did was for a 3 year old child who went on a shop hop with me because there was no opening at a Head Start for several weeks and she tagged along with me throughout my days, waiting for her chair in a classroom. At one of the shops, her little voice saying ooooh, ooooh, oooh, caught my attention, and when I looked out of the door of the room I was in, she was in the hall standing between two rows of discount fabric bolts in a space only a 3 year old could fit in. She was oooh oooh oohing as she was tugging bolt after bolt of pink fabrics that were screaming her name. I bought a yard of each fabric she chose and actually picked another rich pink to tie them all together and made her a quilt from a block she chose out of my book of 1000 quilt blocks.

Back to my documentation: I stood in front of my cubbies of fabric and pulled pinks, oranges, yellows and purples and stacked t hem on my table. I dug out the die cutter and the flying goose die and I cut the fabrics into goose pieces. I put them in a plastic tub and labeled the box (this neatness thing) with a 3 x 5 index card that I marked 6” Flying Geese, Pinks Oranges Yellows and Purples. I put it on a shelf for a future project and promptly forgot about it.

Recently I stumbled onto the box and tried to remember what I had in mind for the quilt and since it is flying geese, they work well in columns. I like column quilts because they are fun to custom quilt and I have a desire to custom quilt a project of my own in the near future. Looking in my EQ program, I found I had already mocked up a quilt with geese in columns and decided to change up my plan a bit and in the columns between the geese I wanted to put log cabin blocks.

The geese columns measure 6” and the column between, 5”. I now needed to go back to the fabric cubbies and find more of the 4 chosen colors, but they have to be subtle because it is the geese that are the stars in this quilt. I don’t have a lot of really light colors, but I found enough to my surprise. I dug through my room and found the graph paper my brother had brought home for me and I cut out a 5” piece to use to design the log cabin block for color placement. Since the log cabin would only have 8 logs and a center, I had to be pretty specific with color placement to use the 4 colors.

Then comes the Corona virus and our world comes screeching to a halt. I still have quilts from customers to quilt, but no longer can we gather in groups and socialize, so I have plenty of spare time to sew. I needed one more color. I was not getting enough variation with my pale versions and wanted a softer orange than I have in house. I ventured out with Tom on a day trip and found several varieties of pale orange and came home with another yard of fabric, but just tiny amounts of each.

I had already pulled a fabric for the outer border when I first cut the geese parts, and I had left in the bottom of the tub with the pieces,

I assembled all my parts, 7 columns of geese and 6 columns of log cabins. When I pulled that perfect piece of fabric I had set aside for the border, (here’s the universe and it’s ha ha moment) it turned out to NOT be a piece of yardage, but a bundle of fat quarters of an entire line of fabric. Think HUGE sigh here, as I am working with colors I am unaccustomed to, and I was so fortunate to have been given this piece of “yardage” that was a perfect choice and it is not going to work. We are now deeper into the quarantine time and I am not willing to venture out into the world one more time for 3 yards of fabric. I will have to make these fat quarters work. I haven’t mentioned how much I hate fat quarters.

Now it’s back to the calculator to test my mad math skills again. You see, I had a large pile of geese left over after assembling the quilt top. They sit in the box forlorn; excluded from being part of the whole.

According to my calculations, four fat quarters would give me the border size I need. I cut four fat quarter fabrics I like together, sew them into a wonderful border, and then find I need just a little more length for the size quilt I want. Don’t you just love how I plan on the fly? This is quilt making at its finest for me. Back into the box, and another 27 flying geese become a column that stretches across the top of the quilt to become a pillow tuck feature.

The top is complete, and I like it!

I get in the tub of backings I have and pull out the orange piece of batik I had been eying the entire time I had been sewing the geese and the log cabin blocks and I’m so excited about my blind choice one day when I shopped at Zincks and picked up a piece of fabric only because I liked it.  It’s another perfect choice that the Universe guided me to. Again, it’s a ha ha moment, and the piece of fabric is only 3 ½ yards long. I need 7 yards. Oy! I get the calculator out AGAIN. It hasn’t failed me yet on this project; I just keep working around the stumbling blocks of not enough and make it work. I can do this again.

I cut the 3 ½ yard length to the length I need, and I have a bit left over. That bit goes on a pile by my table to be put away at a later date (preferably after the quilt is done, just in case I need it). I look in the box at the geese left. There are enough to make 3 more columns! Amazing. I sort them, as 3 rows give me 18”. Add the 18” to the 40” I have from the length of backing I have available, and I have58”. I also found another fabric on the shelf that is yellow and orange that will work. But it is only 12” wide. It must be left over from a backing from another quilt. That leaves about 20” to go, to have enough. I look at the remaining fat quarters, and there are enough (really) to sew them to each other, with some strips of the backing that was left over and set aside to get that last bit of width to give me not only “just enough” but enough extra to make loading the quilt onto the frame possible.

The last four fat quarters get sewn into binding.

If I was the guys on Salvage Dogs, I would have said that worked out just like I drew it up. But actually, it is the Universe, which was not actually laughing at me, but waiting for me to discover it knew all along how all that fabric would come together to be a really lovey idea which was sparked by a customer quilt.

Now that amazes me!