Let the sewing begin

I spent a night this weekend laying out the entire quilt.  I've already sewn together the blues and purples, and I am loving how this looks.  I'm not the best sewer - I can't even seem to sew straight - but I don't care. 

Squares

I finally finished cutting out the squares, all 320 of them.  Seriously, fabric is so darn pretty and smells so good (mmm, spray starch).  Next step, pining them together and pulling out the sewing machine.  

140 down, a lot more to go...

Started cutting out the squares for a new quilt and then started getting tons of ideas for other ones...

Bolts and Fabric

I have a strange issue with bolts.  Meaning, I seem to like to drive right over them and end up puncturing tires in the process.  I have fantastic aim.

The first time, I was driving back from a home visit in Dorchester.  I heard the clunk and kept driving like a loon because there was no way I was going to break down in Dorchester.  The second one I hit at eighty mph returning from NY to MA.  Oops.  We pulled over to the side of the highway (holy jeez, the scariest thing ever), switched drivers and headed to the next rest stop.  My husband put on our skinny little donut in the evil New-England-goes-desert heat and we drove 50 mph on the highway until we could finally pull off an exit.  Many thanks to all the people who had to swerve around us.  I documented it all for posterity ("this is so going on my blog!") and my husband gets the new tires we were arguing about earlier today.

A seven year quilt

I did it!  On this President's Day, I finally finished this crazy quilt.  I sewed up the edges on the binding, laid it out over my bed, and stared at it in something like amazement.  My husband smiled over the quilt and said, "too bad it doesn't have a story," and I said, "but it does!"  In fact, this quilt was subject of my first blog entry...a year and a half ago.  Started during a major snowstorm that shut down all of Maryland precisely seven years ago, it felt timely to finish it while Maryland dug itself out again.  I feel far away from Maryland up here in the north, and needed a way to feel connected again, while also re-examining the separation. 

This quilt really represents our journey from Maryland to Massachusetts, the beginning of a large endeavor set aside until I could figure out my new life here.  Just finding a way to focus on an art activity, much less find space to do work, took effort.  Tackling the quilting took a herculean feat of strength, similar to the intensity of figuring out a big city, going to school, finding a job, being away from home.  After all that work, today I concentrated on the detailing, the binding, the edging, the clean up:  and that is representative of where we are now.  Similarly, today I registered for my licensure test, the culmination of three years of graduate school and two years before that, two internships, over 60 credits, one and half years of work and almost 2,000 hours with clients.  I'm coming to the end of a long cycle.  This quilt says that we live here now, the ending of this seven year journey.  And the truth is, I am still homesick, and I am glad to be coming to the end of all this work.  This has been a tough seven years.  But I did it, and its beautiful.

the quilt that never ends

To test how images will look in this blog layout, I thought I'd share images from a quilt I've been working on for maybe five years. I started it during a series of huge snowstorms that shut down all of Maryland - my job was shut down for a week!

I think it started with a sewing machine that I got for Christmas, and a book on quilts bought with a gift card. My imagination was sparked, and so I started to pick up quilter's squares from craft stores, and then began to order fabric from online stores. I spent hours obsessively coloring in squares of graph paper and then dissecting them with rulers, only to cut and repaste them in different configurations. I loved the idea of choosing a color (green) and then picking five or six fabrics that, even though they were soft lawns straight from Little House on the Prairie, or bold geometric patterns, would equal "green". It was like painting, but softer.

I loved the rituals of fabric. Each piece of fabric has to be processed: it needs to be handwashed in cold water so it doesn't bleed, and so the fabric stiffener is washed out. Then I'd toss it in the washer and dryer (when we had one in our apartment), and completed the process with a hot iron and some spray starch. For some reason this appealed to me, the sensory experience of it all: smells of starch and laundry detergent, the feel of the fabric as it gave up its stiffener to the cold water, the dry heat of the iron. I love my fabric.

I also made copious templates: circles, squares, triangles. Cutting fabric took ages. Once it was all cut, I would pin pieces together and taught myself how to continuously feed two wrong sides together through the machine. Matching up edges was more difficult, and so I would rip seams and repin, over and over again. Deciding how to do the actual quilting was even more consuming. I drew and redrew more graph paper diagrams, and finally set the quilt under my non-quilting sewing machine. Quilting was not a quiet, seated activity: for each pass, I had to get up and coax the monster into place, rolling up the sides and securing its arms with rubber bands.

Then we moved states, and lived in a tiny apartment where a huge quilt couldn't be spread out and finished. We moved again, and all the fabric continued to live quietly, stored in plastic containers that when opened, still smell like starch and ironing. The quilt and its rubber band arms is held together with bent safety pins, and is almost done. It only needs to be maneuvered through the sewing machine for a few more turns, and the binding done. I can do the binding, even the strips are cut and ready to go.

But why don't I finish it? I could snuggle with it, and remember the sensory experience of making it. I can run my fingers over the quilting, and let my eyes follow the patterns that I so carefully laid out. I can make another quilt. Is it simply the experience of strong arming it through the machine that stops me from finishing it? Or is it something related to the fact that this quilt and I started something at the same time, traveling far from home, and have a hard time remembering what we were meant to be in the first place? Either way, when I get it done, I'll post a finished picture.