The Ten Month Quilt

I have been getting a lot of lip recently about not blogging, so here we go.  This post is going to be very unsatisfying to those of you who like sweets, but very satisfying for those of you who are looking for another reason to think I'm awesome.

I made a quilt.  This is not the first quilt I've made, but it is the first one I've made in a long time.  I was super due for a new quilt/bedspread thing for my bed since I was mostly using the same quilt I made right before I went to college 1,000 years ago and it is in a variety of shreds and tatters.

The plan was to make something plain, patchwork, or something pretty easy, but then I went to Amsterdam and we went into all these quilting stores and I was awed and inspired.  

I decided to do triangles.  Then I decided to do blocks of triangles.  Once I'd figured out what I wanted to do in the general sense, and purchased the fabric (including a lot of fat quarters, which are the ends of bolts of fabric and mean it is incredibly hard to find more when you run out), the cutting began.  For this, I owe a lot of thanks to my father who is a bit of a cutting machine if you plunk him in front of the TV with a board, some fabric, and a pair of left-handed fabric scissors.

The cutting was followed by the pinning and then the sewing.  Most of this happened on the Cape and almost all of it took place while listening to the Harry Potter books on audio for the 700th time.  At one point my father asked why I didn't listen to something new, but I pointed out that listening to something you know very well is good when the sewing machine is going to be going off at random 15 second intervals. 

By the end of the summer, I had blocked all the pieces together and then school started.  So, the pieces sat in my living room for the next eight months.  Once in a while I looked at them.  They were pretty.

Come April vacation, I schlepped the sewing machine back down to the Cape (there is more space there), and set back to work with my scissors, ironing board and sewing machine.  It was an absolutely beautiful week, so I put the ironing board and iron outside on the deck, and left the sewing machine inside on the screened porch.  It was kind of bliss.

Four days of ironing, sewing, stitch-ripping, more sewing, and swearing later, it was ready to be sewn together.  This part took three women and my being inside the quilt on multiple occasions.  

But when it was done, it was worth it.

Here it is in all its glory.  The Ten Month Quilt.