Quilting: The Real Story

While it appears that I have taken the brave plunge into the world of quilting over the last year and come up swimming like a pro, I have a confession to make. I'm not that good. Turns out, that quilting is actually far more complicated than I had first anticipated and though I've tried to hide it, I'd just like to let everyone know it's true, I'm not that good.

Let me clarify some things for you faithful readers out there (and if you are not interested in sewing in the slightest, feel free to stop reading now, because that is what this post is all about). Firstly, making a quilt is actually something more like a three step process. Firstly, you need to piece the cover of your quilt. The bit that has the different fabrics and patterns and fancy stuff. The part that will be on display. Doing that is called "Piecing".

I'd say that in the last year, I've gotten much better at piecing. From my first attempts at getting things straight with corners matching up and what not, to my most recent experiences, the piecing is the most satisfying part of making a quilt. I like using up the scrappy bits of fabric, starting with small sections that eventually come together to make something fabulous. Piecing. That's where it's at.

The next step of making a quilt is actually sewing your lovely quilt top, the wadding and the backing fabric together. This is the part that is called "Quilting"; where you sandwich all those layers together with lots of stitches to hold everything in place. To me, this is the most difficult part. It's not the most time consuming (nope, that's piecing, because you've got all the cutting and pressing as well as the sewing), but it's certainly the trickiest.

All those layers need to be stuck together, either with pins, basting stitches or basting glue and then the entire thing has to be put through your sewing machine. It's difficult to juggle a 1.5m by 2m quilt through that little space on your sewing machine. Actually, the word difficult doesn't really seem to cover or explain just what it's like. This is where (for me at least) things go wrong. The bottom fabric pulls in ways you can't see, the wadding is so thick that it's taking forever for each needle strike to actually get through all the layers, the top fabric, despite all the basting and pins is shifting as you try to pull it through.

Maybe I'm doing it wrong, maybe I'm not going slow enough (actually, that could be part of it :P), but at the end of the day, I've got puckers and pulls and nothing is sitting quite as squarely as it was when I first put all the layers together. It happened on the Block of the Month Quilt of 2013 and it happened again last week when I quilted the Log Cabin Quilt.

I have to admit, I was quite depressed to see what happened after I pulled it through mum's sewing machine (Harriet the Husqvana) that one last time.  Especially given that I'd spent and hour doing it with just this much of a Mary Poppins Song in my head:

"Jelly isn't jelly 'till you set it, anything can happen if you let it!"

Talk about irritating. I did wonder for a while about how to get better, but aside from practicing (which btw, seems like a very expensive way to make a lot of rubbish before you making anything good), I've got nothing.

Anyway, the final part of making a quilt involves putting a edge on your quilted sandwich of fabrics and wadding. This is called "Binding". This part is all I have left to do with the Log Cabin Quilt. Maybe I'll do it today, maybe I'll do it tomorrow. One things for sure, the sooner I do it, the sooner Sophie will be unable to come along and pull out bits of wadding from my lovely quilt sandwich. That'd be nice.

In summary, making a quilt on the whole, is something I can do, and enjoy doing, especially the piecing. Actual quilting, is not.