A young sea dog's quilt for a grandchild on becoming a schoolboy. The fourth grandchild among the others to start school this autumn.
Since ships are the alpha and omega for this young man, I began preparing for the sewing half a year in advance. First I borrowed from the library "Ships. An encyclopedia. 1500 naval and civil ships." I worked through it carefully, made notes and finally picked out the 35 that I judged the most exciting of all time, scanned the pictures and added the ships' names to the photographs. Then I transferred the photographs onto fabric (the relevant paper from an office supplies shop) and began the process of sewing the quilt.
After long thought and experiment I set aside a pile of patterned fabrics in "nautical" tones and took up checked and striped dress shirt fabrics (production offcuts).
The arithmetic, or creative calculation, of fitting 35 pictures with all their strips into 140 x 200 cm was likewise a long and time consuming process; as a perfectionist I had to arrive at the one right solution.
When my thoughts ran into a dead end, I pulled on my rubber boots and went off to dig the garden, weed or pick berries. That is the advantage of sewing for yourself: no deadline or other constraints tick at the back of your head. If it is going well, I work. If my head is full of sticks, I leave it where it is. Often the best thoughts and decisions come at night instead.
With the pictures it nags at me that I used the book's photographs without asking the author, but only for my own use after all, and by way of thanks I add a picture of the book at the end. A superb book.
