My brother started a blog. It's really good and I want to comment on his blog post but then he'll see that I have a blog and then he might have spare time and he might read all the dumb old posts. Plus my parents read my brother's blog and they might see my comment and they might come to visit my blog and then THEY might have (no, definitely have--they're retired!) spare time and come see my blog... To prevent deep reading, I am going to write a detailed, quilt-heavy post so they can see it's not worth diving in here.
Here is a picture of a quilt I made:
(This is the quilt made to look like the house where I grew up, where my parents still live)
(This is the actual house)It took a year. Lots of that year was spent avoiding the sewing room altogether because some aspects of this quilt were geometrically confusing to my head. For instance, the diagonal sky. It was like, "WHAT?" And the house was hard, too. Really, any time you get diagonal, I turn into a frustrated monkey who can't figure out how to the square piece into the round hole. Seam allowances, squaring off...Not to mention I was learning to use my rotary cutter as I made this quilt. (This is the part of my blog where I reveal to non-sewing readers that they really have no interest in reading my blog!) See all the strips? I bled over those strips. I learned that rotary cutters don't solve all the world's problems over those strips. I learned that you really must find a way to keep your ruler still or else the strips get that dumb arched imprecision.
I started the house quilt in like November of 2009 and finally gave it to my parents in mid-December of 2010. It was supposed to be a Christmas 2009 present. But they've known me for like almost 34 years now, so if they aren't used to disappointment over the timeliness of promised "creative" gifts by now, then it's their own damn fault. (I don't really think that! That's just tough talk. In reality I was embarrassed and guilty.)
Here are some final thoughts on this quilt, along with some detail shots:
- I wish I had waited until I was more skilled at making quilts before I tackled this one.
- I say that because I think I could have made a more beautiful and less-childish-looking quilt if I had just had a little more experience with that uniquely-quilty experience of not-having-the-faintest-idea-of-what-the-finished-product-will-look-like-until-you-have-a-finished-product. This turns out to be one of my favorite aspects of making quilts, as it turns the whole endeavor into a kind of surprise party (not that anyone's ever thrown me one, but a girl can hope). However, with a little more experience, I've learned some things that would have made the process of the house quilt into a slightly less painstaking process. For instance, I might have done a little more cracking-out on Flickr house quilt groups. I could have learned some things about depth and perspective (I really hate that I didn't have the flowers in the front of the house wrap around a little bit to create an illusion of...I dunno, dimension?)
- Most importantly (and this is going to be the last point I make because I'm even boring myselfby hand* is so disproportionately large compared to the time it takes to piece the motherfucker, that if you don't do your level best to make the best possible design, you are going to have a veritable eternity to second-guess your choices. This point applies more to another quilt (a pink and horrible-looking one) a little more, but still: when you're hand-quilting, you are looking at the design in minute detail for like thousands of minutes. And if you took any shortcuts because you were sick of trying to figure out diagonal sky (for instance), you are doomed to regret it--because you are going to be sewing hundreds of teensy tiny stitches all over that screwed-up-looking diagonal sky! You can't escape!
That's it, I think. I'm just waiting for the other quilt photos to load. That means this post might never be finished because it's been loading now for like five whole minutes...here), the amount of time a body spends quilting a quilt *On hand-quilting:
*I shall write another post someday on this subject. I love to do it because it keeps my hands busy while I'm participating in fun lazy things like TV-watching. And there is really nothing so special than a hand-quilted quilt that somebody slaved over for you. The machine-quilted quilt is nice, but it's less of a labor of love. There's less poetry in it, yo.
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