I come to you tonight with a great feeling of relief because I have FINALLY finished the quilt that has given me nothing but problems for the past 4 months. It started out easy enough, a quilt to comfort a far away friend dealing with tragedy. I figured it could be the warm hug that I was unable to give so many miles away. I talked to other mutual friends and they wanted to help, making donations to it's creation. Great! We were going to get together to send our old friend all of our love. Let's get to sewing!
And I did. I went and got so many beautiful fabrics, designed a pattern, and started to sew. It started out so well too. Sure, there were some small problems mismeasurements, running out of fabrics, basic stuff, easy to fix. I finished the quilt front in about 2 weeks.
After I finished the front I moved onto the back. I'd decided to do a patchwork for the back too so after measuring the final size of my quilt front I began cutting and blocking. That's when the first problem happened, apparently my measuring tape was off. A little bit each inch which added up to about 8" across my quilt when all was said and done. I found this out when I was laying the back, batting, and front out to pin them all together for quilting. I had to take them all apart and add to the backing fabric. Since it was about midnight when I found this all out, I folded the pieces and put them on the side table and went to bed.
The next morning I awoke to the quilt bottom on the floor, the top outside, and the batting all in pieces. My chew happy dog had taken them off the table and decided to make them her own. Luckily she did no damage to the sewn pieces, or so I thought. I collected my work from her bed, scolded her and got back to work adding to the back. This is now a month into the project.
Okay, back fixed, batting replaced, time to pin all the pieces together for quilting! That's when I found out that my beloved dog, Grace, did do damage to the quilt leaving a hole right in the middle of the top piece. Argh! Still, I finished pinning everything together and went to quilt it but the machine quilting I had planned just looked awful. So I decided to hand tie it. Thanks to an up tic in work, this all got put aside for another month.
I started tying my quilt and it seemed like this was the way to go. I could only do a few rows at a time, though, since, by this time, I was deep into working on the Zombie X-Stitch book (in stores Spring 2010!) so it took another month. I finished tying it last week and bound the edges this past weekend with little problems (and lots of Doctor Who). Once that was all done I covered the hole Grace made with a butterfly applique and added a few more to make it all look more deliberate and less like I was covering a hole made by my dog. This afternoon I finished the last applique and was finally finished. Yea!
Here are some pics!
The front of the quilt (that center butterfly is hiding that pesky hole).
A close up of one of the butterflies. I'm actually really happy with how they turned out and think they make a beautiful addition to the finished quilt.
The back of the quilt. I'm quite fond of how this patchwork turned out.
Then I decided to wash it. I guess I'm glad I did since pretty much all of the ties came loose and I'd rather that happen to me than to my friend, but man was it crushing when I took it out of the machine. This evening I fixed all the ties and I think they will hold. To quote my mom, "dear, once you finish that I suggest you box it up and pack it away before anything else can happen to it." And that's exactly what I did.
I'm so happy it's done. Had I not been making this for such a good reason, I'd have scrapped it long ago but I'm glad I didn't. I'm really happy with how it looks and I hope it comforts my friend and lets her know she's loved.
Okay, back to boyfriend work! Talk to you soon.
Hearts and puppies,
erika
