The next piece of work is already taking shape.
I have never made a quilt this large before: 240x240 cm. The room was clearly too small. Next time I should perhaps find a way to haul the sofa up to the ceiling on cables when work this big is under way. I cannot bear to give up the sofa in the sewing room either. Or else a wall has to come down. That is an option too.
On the other hand my eyes see with joy how the enormous roll of wadding burying half the studio is already visibly shrinking. And I ran out of safety pins AGAIN. I keep buying them by the box, but now even 200 was not enough. Twice I have tried curved safety pins too. To my mind there is no great difference. The curved ones are a little more pleasant to push in and they have a slightly finer, sharper point as well. But then they tend to come open of their own accord. Sometimes. The others, that is the straight ones, never open by themselves.
This quilt now has to be pushed under the machine and properly quilted through. Beautiful quilting gives a quilt a pleasant relief surface. And not only that. A quilt properly quilted into a pattern stays nicely patterned after washing too, and there is no need to worry about creases or about the wadding finding itself another place inside the quilt.
It takes a great deal of time and effort, but the result is worth it. Or as I have been told: quilting gives a quilt its face 🙂
To be continued...
Right then. With a couple of hundred safety pins holding the layers of the quilt together, I creep behind the machine with it and sew the lengthwise quilting. That fixes the layers of the quilt to one another more or less. Then the edges are secured and I cut off the surplus wadding and backing at the edges. Now close to 10 m of binding has to be cut out, the pieces sewn together and folded double and pressed.
Now the quilt goes wrong side up and the binding is attached to the quilt. Then the quilt is turned over and the top seam of the binding is sewn. Sewing the binding alone means close to 60 m of seams.
And now the most exciting part: free motion quilting.
So far I have only done free motion quilting on the borders of quilts, above all of baby quilts: little flowers, leaves, dots and so on. Or little blooms inside the squares. I have never quilted a quilt this large all over. We shall see how it goes.
The free motion foot onto the machine and off we go.
You simply start drawing little lines with the seam from one end and keep "firing away" until the whole quilt is hatched over. I will keep to myself how long that took me. You can guess 🙂
At first I was afraid my shoulders would seize up or my tongue would get tired 🙂 You know how the tongue works along with you when you are doing something very carefully. But no, my neck felt as if someone had pushed a stick into it. Within a couple of hours. But on the whole it was tremendous; I really did enjoy it. It was not as bad as I feared at first. That I would be doing this quilting for a whole week. 🙂
The squares of the pattern I left unquilted. They are now splendidly puffy, like little cushions.
More pictures of the finished quilt in portfolio, quilts for grown ups.
