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.