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.