When Pippo and I got back home last summer after being in Massachusetts for the weddings, we still had a month left of the deployment. Just one, but goodness, is that last month a long one!
I decided he needed a homecoming quilt, because I needed a project to keep me from going crazy during those last few weeks, and because (and this will give you an idea what sort of a mental state I was in, one that reminded me of nothing so much as pre-baby nesting) it seemed easier to me to make him a homecoming quilt than to decide what to put on a printed homecoming banner.
That's right. There are generous companies that will print military families a big homecoming banner for free — you just have to give them enough time and tell them what pictures and/or words to print on there.
But at the time, this seemed simpler.
This is actually a quilt that I had been designing in my mind for a while. I decided I really loved the look of quilts made from strips of fabric (you can see some of the ones that inspired me on my quilting Pinterest board), and I had a few pretty fabrics in my stash that I really wanted to use in a project for my own house (not least because I thought they'd go perfectly in my living room!).
I nudged the whole thing a little thing more towards “manly” than I perhaps would have if it weren't for my husband, but basically I decided I was just going to make something that I was really excited about.
It was sort of a little bit like, “Welcome home! I made myself a quilt.”
Except that I knew he'd love it, too, because he cleverly tends to love the things that I make.
The advantage of making a strip quilt is that it goes together very quickly! (I am not the only one who's figured this out!) It's very rewarding. I love picking out pretty fabrics, and I love quilting, but I get easily bored during the piecing stage. This quilt was perfect for me.
I gathered all my fabric (most of it, other than the backing, I had in my stash, though I did make a trip to the fabric store to fill in a few little gaps) and cut it into strips, selvedge to selvedge. I purposely made the strips different widths (all between 1.5″ and 3″ or so), and didn't worry about them being perfectly straight, since I liked the quilts I saw that seemed a little wonky.
Then I organized my long strips up into piles (whites, blues, oranges, etc), pulled them out two at a time, and sewed them together. The long strips got cut into short strips (a little longer than I wanted my actual strips to be, since my wonky cutting meant they weren't completely square), and as I cut them I divided them up into seven piles as randomly as I could.
Not sure exactly what he was doing, but I'm sure it was Helpful. |
The short strips got sewn into long strips (the other way this time) again, as randomly as my control-freak nature would allow.
Once I had these done, I trimmed the edges so they were all the same width. (I didn't trim the length, but that was silly. It would have been much easier to do this then, or else after the top was all sewn together, instead of after quilting the whole thing, which is when I ended up having to do it.)
The trickiest part was lining up those strips and figuring out how to sew them all together so I didn't end up with a big red stripe running across my “random” quilt. This took many hours, much squinting and rearranging, and more than a little chocolate. But I figured it out and sewed it all together.
Then I just quilted it by hand in straight lines — simple! Made those long evenings go by faster! I couldn't sleep anyway! Come home, already!
My first quilt with rounded corners! It made the binding very easy. I'd never actually made and used proper bias binding before — my mind hurt a little while I was trying to figure it out, but once I did I loved it.
I was thwarted, I thought, by the fact that my sewing machine doesn't have a walking foot (and, it turns out, is one of approximately three sewing machines in the world that doesn't take a universal feet). But after some encouragement from my sister-in-law, who can make an entire beautiful quilt in the time it takes me to make a square, I just went ahead and sewed on the binding without one. Turns out it wasn't a problem at all! Who knew?
(Not google, that's who. But thankfully Annie did.)
Naturally, it wasn't actually done when he got home. Almost, but not quite.
It was all quilted, and I was tempted to go ahead and finish it up, but when I found myself googling “how to make bias binding” at midnight the night before he got home, I made myself shut the computer and go to bed.
As you might have guessed, he didn't mind.
I didn't either, of course.
(It's bigger than a throw blanket — just about twin size, in fact. It lives on our living room sofa, and is great for snuggling under to read a book or watch a movie. It also makes a pretty good tent.)
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