The quilt design is a rail fence pattern; there are four color groups, each with five fabrics. The strips of five fabrics in a color group are sewn together, and then square blocks are cut. The squares alternate color and horizontal/vertical orientation across each row and down each column. We chose all batik fabrics from Sew Sassy in Urbana, Illinois. Our four color groups were blues, greens, purples (but warm, red-hued purples), and reds (but cool, orange-reds). Our inner border is a gold-orange batik with sweeping, distinct swirls, and the outer border is yet another batik, this one with a blue field with small, abstract flowers in golds, purples, and greens. Some of the flowers have filled-in petals with interesting centers, but others are just outlines.
The batting we selected proved to be an interesting choice. Kara's kids all love the exceptional drape and softness of a lightweight polyfil batting, but I had a quilt with less drape and a little more oomph in mind, although I didn't want it to be heavy. A wool batting would have been a good middle ground, except Karen is allergic to wool. We actually found an interesting compromise: a 50/50 blend of organic cotton and bamboo. This batting has a very interesting property that we cursed at first but have grown to love: It's really, really sticky. Before we knew just how sticky it was, we went on our merry way, smoothing out the backing on my (huge) dining room table, smoothing the batting over it, and then laying on the pieced top. It sure felt all smooth from the top, so we pinned it with safety pins & then decided the machine quilting would go much better with basting threads to avoid rather than safety pins to avoid. When we were well over half way done basting, we felt a wrinkle; and when picked up a corner to peek, we saw the backing was just riddled with wrinkles! That's when the cursing started in earnest. So out came the basting threads, out came the safety pins, up came the top & batting, and out came those blasted wrinkles. As we pondered the wisdom of our $50 organic cotton / bamboo renewable resource batting, Kara realized the much maligned stickiness could also be our friend. After de-wrinkling the backing and re-layering the batting, Kara realized we could grab the corners and just flip only those two layers to see the right-side of the backing and smooth out the wrinkles before flipping it back to add the top. It worked great! We also realized after the success of our second attempt that we could streamline the process by starting with the batting, laying the backing on it right-side up, then flipping it just once before laying on the top.
For the sake of expedience and sanity (important, ultimately, given my obssessive-compulsive nature and love of precision), we decided to machine quilt using the "stitch in the ditch" approach. As Kara says, "If you can drive a car, you can stitch in the ditch." The batting has an 8" quilting distance, so we didn't need to do anything for the 2" inner border and shouldn't have needed to do anything for the 4" outer border, but given Kara's love of hand-quilting, I wanted to give that a try, especially after she had the brilliant idea to outline one or two flowers in the border all the way around. So, after a quick hand-quilting lesson, and after realizing what a pain-in-the-butt the tiny, tight curves were, and after stitching around just a handful of flowers, I abandoned that idea. Also, there was just enough bearding to annoy my aesthetic, especially on the deep, midnight blue batik backing fabric. So, after consultation with my favorite machine quilting book, I borrowed Kara's free-hand foot to machine-outline a flower or two every four to six inches. I have three words for how it worked: "FAB - U - LOUS" as my people would say. It worked so well and was so much fun, I decided to free-hand machine quilt around each of the solid flowers, although I also decided to take some small liberties with the petals and omitted the notches in most petals because the detail was just too small. And free-handing was so much fun, I decided to free-hand my initials and the year in the lower-right hand corner.
We decided to bind the quilt using the outer-border fabric, but shortly after that last lesson to get me blind-stitching the binding on the back, I got distracted with the bag (to be discussed in a future post), and then I had the reality check moment when a text from the brother-in-law mention that his wife's second chemo treatment would be on Friday (yikes, already!!), I had to call on Kara's generosity with her time yet again for helping getting that binding sew down. Of course, I was quite silly in having her start in the opposite corner from me: She should have started one side ahead of me, as she's three times as fast. So, we had to worked sections out of order rather than each of us making a smooth trip around the perimeter, but it gave Kara opportunities to check that her six children hadn't gotten into too much mischief, and then toward the end it gave her an excuse to go make daiquiris. Between the daiquiri and finishing my first quilt, I was giddy with excitement. I was, as I wrote in a previous post, consumed with my own fabulousness.
Quilt #0001 made a trip through the washer and dryer last night, and it's on its third trip this morning, and I think the four total cycles have achieved the desired breaking in, and I'm skeptical that a five trip is really necessary at this point. The quilted flowers in the border puffed up nicely, and my cursive initials & year in the border pop out quite nicely, and I am uniformly thrilled to have learned how to do this and managed a 62" by 72" quilt for my sister-in-law in such short order.
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