quiltkeeping

[truepenny]

Okay, so here's the thing. About a year and a half ago, I started quilting and fell madly in love with it. This is peculiar, because I have lousy fine motor control, lousy eyesight, and the patience of a squirrel on speed when it comes to handicrafts. And yet I started hand-quilting, and I'm not terribly good at it, but I do enjoy it. The bits I don't enjoy, though, are the prep-work and the finishing, so my first project stalled out, entirely quilted but with the edges unbound, and the second project didn't get off the ground because of all the cutting and measuring between me and the actual quilting bit. (I hate the prep-work because I'm really bad at it. I cannot and never have been able to cut in a straight line. The binding just bores me. See above re: squirrels and substance abuse.)

However.

On Thursday, I walked to a local fabric store with HL, she in search of thread, myself in search of a buckle to replace the one that broke at Minicon and has meant I've been hauling my copious quantities of junk around in a World Fantasy Con bag ever since. No suitable buckle--if a metal buckle failed, it's not even worth sending the plastic one into the ring--but quarters, with some seriously cool fabrics, and because (a.) I'm a magpie and (b.) I have no self-control this spring, I bought several of them, and have thus been reinspired.

And it further occurred to me that, just as posting about my dissertation & fiction writing helps keep me focused on them, possibly posting about the quilting would keep me focused on it, so I would actually manage to finish things, which would be a major plus.

So. Current projects: small quilted thing (the book calls it a placemat, but I'm not about to make a set of them, so it's just a Small Quilted Thing (SQT) to me), and quilt for the couch, to be called Cat-Walk, because I'm making it partly out of a Kliban cat comforter I've had since I was eight or so. This is what the cats look like, so you can see why, despite the fact that the comforter is falling apart, I have refused to get rid of it, and now am determined to salvage all the cats I can. The SQT is finished except for the binding; the Cat-Walk quilt is waiting for me to get my act together and disembowel the comforter.

Progress made today
SQT: Repaired (hopefully) the spot where I cut badly in trimming. Realized that one reason I haven't done the binding is that the fabric I'd intended to use, for reasons of thrift, looks just plain hideous. Must find more suitable something-or-other and then see about using HL's sewing machine. I do kind of feel like using the machine is cheating, but at this point I frankly don't give a rat's ass. And I always remember Rose Wilder's comment that if her mother and aunts and grandmothers and great-aunts had had access to a sewing machine, you would have had to beat them away from it with a stick. Maybe two sticks. (Okay, that's not what she said, but it's what she meant.)

Cat-Walk: Liberated 30 cats. Put 30 cats in with the laundry for tomorrow. Will remember this time to test for color-fastness before I start sewing.

Comments

[malinaldarose.livejournal.com]

Hm. I've been contemplating learning to quilt. I love x-stitch, and I do basic crochet -- chiefly afghans for relatives, all in the same basic double and triple crochet pattern, but of course, there are the wrists to consider. Bleh. Stupid girly wrists.

And the sewing machine quote, is that Rose Wilder, Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's the Rose Wilder in question. I've forgotten her married name.

[pameladean]

You don't have to use cut tags as far as I'm concerned. I'll read you about anything.

I can't cut stuff out either. Pat Wrede once tried to teach me how to sew, confident that it was merely that I had been taught unkindly. Nope. I'm bad at it. Now you'll inspire me to try again. Just what I need.

Rose Wilder's mother and grandmother HAD a sewing machine. It's in one of the last two Little House books. Much admiration and joy about it. And the usual meticulous description. Huh. I guess Rose didn't really write those books after all. Or else she did and put that machine in just to be wicked. Yipes.

Pamela

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

You don't have to use cut tags as far as I'm concerned. I'll read you about anything.

*blushes violently*
Thank you.

The Rose Wilder Lane thing is a tremendously loose paraphrase of my memory of something she wrote in Women's Day Book of American Needlework. I know that the sentiment was that pioneer women (who invented or developed most of the stuff American needlework is all about) would have been baffled beyond belief by the modern belief that hand-sewing is somehow more authentic and virtuous than machine-sewing, but she may very well have been talking about how her family did react to sewing machines, rather than how they would have reacted.

That's a really good book, btw, although finding it on Amazon to get the title and her full name brought me face to face again with the fact that people have started writing Little House spin-offs about all of LIW's female relatives, and that makes me slightly ill. But that's not this particular book's fault, and I did love it as a teenager, despite being clumsy and generally uninterested in that sort of thing.

[heresluck]

Using the sewing machine is completely not cheating. If nature had intended us to hand-sew, thumbs would come with thimbles already attached.

I've finished off all current projects (available jeans now doubled!), so feel free to borrow anytime.

Keep talking

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

I took up quilting a couple of years ago, but work in bursts, because my life is so frequently complicated. I love the cutting up (although I'm not that good at straight lines - I recommend a rotary cutter, by the way, if you don't already use one. If I had to use scissors, I would not quilt, period - and quite enjoy the bit with the sewing machine though I can't do a scant quarter-inch seam were my life to depend on it. I haven't done much quilting yet as I'm quilting my first quilt by hand, and it's heavy and I have to do stab stitch rather than the 'several stitches on the needle' thing, but I'm happy, and my hand stitching is improving.

It's colour that bothers me, use of it, I mean. Scares me rigid.

And apart from the people at patchwork class (it's more like a club than a class now, I'm the youngest by twenty years, and I'm rather fond of my tribe of adopted disgraceful aunties and grannies) I never get to talk to anyone about quilting, so keep talking.

Re: Keep talking

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I can't get the hang of the multiple-quilting-stitches-on-the-needle thing at all. I read the explanations in the books, look at the little diagrams, and it all makes sense until I'm confronted with actual cloth and actual thread and an actual needle, all laughing uproariously. So I stab stitch everything. Which actually works out just fine.

And I do use a rotary cutter, and it is better than scissors, but it still gives me fits.

I love your description of your patchwork class.