This is the last of the four baby quilts I pieced in Key West. It is for a baby girl, the second child but first daughter, soon to be born to our former midshipmen and his wife. We were his sponsors while he was at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis and it's true what we'd heard during our first sponsorship briefing that these relationships often become lifelong. Though he is assigned in California after a few years in Japan, we are still close.
Last night, as I pulled this quilt out of the dryer at the Andrews AFB campground laundry and held it up to show my husband, I realized for the first time that the design in the middle was off-center. How does something like that escape notice when you are working so intimately with a project such as hand quilting a baby quilt?
I yo-yo'ed about what to do with it. Initially I thought it was too late to fix it. After sleeping on it, I woke up with that 'duh' feeling, knowing that the fix was relatively simple - I'd just cut the bottom two rows off, re-sew the binding, and call it a day. But after looking at it some more and doing measurements, I decided to leave it as it is. I didn't want it smaller, and didn't want to pull the top off as well to sew one of the strips there just to add a couple more inches. Perhaps this error will be part of the charm of this quilt.
One of my quilting mentors told me that every quilt has a mistake made either by accident or on purpose. In re-building a vintage Sun Bonnet Sue quilt for a friend, I found about three mistakes that I doubt the original quilter realized was there, or at least not until too late. I actually enjoyed finding those errors. It made me feel an even stronger connection with the woman whose hands had held that fabric and whose eyes had studied every inch of it in excruciating detail, as had mine.
I don't profess to have enough expertise that I have to make a mistake on purpose. I know I have several mistakes in my work. The major causes of my mistakes are lack of experience and working too fast. If I were working slowly, to achieve as much perfection as I could, as if I were going to enter each quilt in a contest, I would have very different work from this point forward. That's not to say that I think I've done is sloppy work. I am learning as I'm going, and I know that hand work is not the same as machine work. I'm not sure I want a quilt that is so perfect that it looks machine sewn and store bought. And working out of an RV that doesn't always have electric hookups, or if it does, the electric source may not be the 50 amps needed to power my sewing machine as well as heat or AC or even lights.
Having said that, I think I will slow down with my next quilt, and if that means waiting two months in the middle of a quilt while we do a long section of the Appalachian Trail, so be it.
This quilt was made with what they call a donut roll of fabric. I was initially just going to sew the strips together and do some type of applique over them to add a personal, creative touch. But the donut row fabric had a slight curve in each strip. WTH? I asked one of my quilting mentors about that and she said to iron them next time. I'm pretty sure I'd done that. And that was the second donut strip that I'd used for quilting a baby blanket and I had trouble with the first one as well. I have a couple more of the donut strips (I have to admit, they are fun to buy and with on-line coupons you can get them almost half price) so I will approach even more carefully the next time.
As for this quilt, the design of smaller strips in the middle was my solution for trying to use the fabric in a way to minimize the obvious curve in the strips. Again, working against the clock with our RV movements influenced my decision toward a quicker solution.
I yo-yo'ed about what to do with it. Initially I thought it was too late to fix it. After sleeping on it, I woke up with that 'duh' feeling, knowing that the fix was relatively simple - I'd just cut the bottom two rows off, re-sew the binding, and call it a day. But after looking at it some more and doing measurements, I decided to leave it as it is. I didn't want it smaller, and didn't want to pull the top off as well to sew one of the strips there just to add a couple more inches. Perhaps this error will be part of the charm of this quilt.
One of my quilting mentors told me that every quilt has a mistake made either by accident or on purpose. In re-building a vintage Sun Bonnet Sue quilt for a friend, I found about three mistakes that I doubt the original quilter realized was there, or at least not until too late. I actually enjoyed finding those errors. It made me feel an even stronger connection with the woman whose hands had held that fabric and whose eyes had studied every inch of it in excruciating detail, as had mine.
I don't profess to have enough expertise that I have to make a mistake on purpose. I know I have several mistakes in my work. The major causes of my mistakes are lack of experience and working too fast. If I were working slowly, to achieve as much perfection as I could, as if I were going to enter each quilt in a contest, I would have very different work from this point forward. That's not to say that I think I've done is sloppy work. I am learning as I'm going, and I know that hand work is not the same as machine work. I'm not sure I want a quilt that is so perfect that it looks machine sewn and store bought. And working out of an RV that doesn't always have electric hookups, or if it does, the electric source may not be the 50 amps needed to power my sewing machine as well as heat or AC or even lights.
Having said that, I think I will slow down with my next quilt, and if that means waiting two months in the middle of a quilt while we do a long section of the Appalachian Trail, so be it.
This quilt was made with what they call a donut roll of fabric. I was initially just going to sew the strips together and do some type of applique over them to add a personal, creative touch. But the donut row fabric had a slight curve in each strip. WTH? I asked one of my quilting mentors about that and she said to iron them next time. I'm pretty sure I'd done that. And that was the second donut strip that I'd used for quilting a baby blanket and I had trouble with the first one as well. I have a couple more of the donut strips (I have to admit, they are fun to buy and with on-line coupons you can get them almost half price) so I will approach even more carefully the next time.
As for this quilt, the design of smaller strips in the middle was my solution for trying to use the fabric in a way to minimize the obvious curve in the strips. Again, working against the clock with our RV movements influenced my decision toward a quicker solution.
