Quilt while you’re ahead, making a piece with the past

Alternate Title: Putting the ‘f’ in folk

I made two quilts out of old clothes my kids wore and they are among the coolest things I have ever produced…apart from maybe those same kids. It was an odyssey into the heart of folk art that involved a lot of f-bombs.

Can quilting ever be cool? I think the short answer to that is no. It is too time consuming and finicky and concerned about angles and maths to ever be really cool. After a three month foray into the world of quilting I can safely say I don’t think it is about to go all trendy like knitting did. There may be attempts at “Stitch and Bitch” groups but there is an over-reliance on words like “True Quilt” and “Heirloom” for it to adopt any kind of street cred. I suppose you could try naming it Cloth Mash-Up but I think it will still sit there looking uncomfortable like it would rather wait in the car.

Quilting will stay frumpy because that is it’s nature.

But if frumpy becomes cool quilting will be the vanguard.

I accidentally fell in with the quilting crowd because of an over sentimental hoarding habit as my daughters grew. Some baby clothes I could pass on, others kid’s items were too girly or too twee or (by the second child) too disgusting to keep. But every now and then an iconic item would emerge. That shirt with the deer. Those fuzzy jammies. That cardigan I loved. For whatever reason I just could not part with them and I put them in a garbage bag and planned to make a blanket or something out of them. This is in direct opposition to my husband’s tendencies to mercilessly throw everything away. If it turns out we had a portal to a planetary dump in the living room it would explain a lot.

There is a certain amount of self-regulation that happens when you store stuff in a garbage bag and share your house with a person who acts like an antibody. I painlessly lost many bags full of sentimental cloth to charity shops and dump runs along the way. But any items that did survive The Cull of the Antibody have been with us for years, sometimes a decades worth of tattered clothes jammed in storage with the intention of being creative one day. They have moved house with us at least five times. And this is why I know that bags full of uncompleted projects are annoying trolls that sit in cupboards and judge you whenever you are looking for string, or wrapping paper or mice.

So with the determined air of someone who is finally going to learn Spanish or to play guitar I decided to do something about it. This was my first mistake. My second was asking a friend who is serious about quilting for help. I don’t know why I thought she would depart from her personality and say “Yeah just bung it all together with a bit of thread and Bob’s yer uncle, you’ll be fine.”

Instead she looked horrified at the selection of cloth. Then she looked pensive about how a person could even begin to try and put together a quilt with different weights and textures and patterns. Then she looked simply … overwhelmed.

She encouraged me to look at quilting magazines for pictures and patterns. My whole brain glazed over and all I could see was Little House on the Prarie gingham and bunnies. I could sense I had opened a trap door into a storage cellar full of trouble. Next I would be pickling things and passing out preserves and adorning large vegetables with ribbons and carrying bonny pigs around in my apron and calling everyone “kind sir”.

All because I just wanted this stupid mound of judgemental clothing to go away.

But then My Quilting Friend had a brainwave. She called me from work and said she had the perfect idea. Clearly this had been percolating in her brain. She decided I would frame the pieces with cotton to tie the wildly different bits together and use stabilizer fusing to be able to manage the cloth. Then she talked a lot about mathematics. What I heard was “blah blah blah blah five and a half inch squares”

So I cut a bunch of squares.

But I think the stabilizer stuff is my new favourite invention. You just iron it on.

I had quite a big brainwave about measuring the squares of fusey stuff to the exact size I needed so I wouldn’t have to measure the squares. I felt MQF (My Quilting Friend) was being a little too finicky about quarter inches and cutting precisely. So basically I cut squares of cloth. Then I ironed on the fuse and then used a roller cutter and big square rulers and a giant measuring placemat and cut and measured and cut and measured for about one thousand years. I began to care about quarter inches.

However slapdash you may have been in life, however careless and disregarding of human life, there is nothing, NOTHING like cutting a perfectly straight line with a diamond sharp rolling cutter and then making a little pile of perfect squares…seriously, nothing.

So now I could recognize I was making a slow Walter-White-to-Heisenberg-type character transformation from careless hoarder towards proponent of Germanic efficiency. But it was short-lived. Next I had to cut strips of cotton into 2.5 inch widths and 5.5 inch lengths. I did this with pink and yellow cloth but made a huge giant mistake that is likely to wipe future populations off the face of the earth…at least that’s how MQF portrayed it. I did not wash the yellow cloth before cutting it. Now what you and I may not know and that real quilters do, is that apparently cotton can run bad in the wash. It bucks and splays and tears from its prior form until it is just twisted molecular carnage, a laughing wreckage of it’s former shape. It is only polite to let cotton have its screaming identity crisis in the laundry and dryer before you hold it to type. Now one day I will wash that quilt and it will naturally assume the form of the devil or something.

Next I had to pin the cotton strips onto the cloth squares and sew them on. For the purpose I borrowed my mother-in-laws Singer Sewing Machine circa 1963.

Every now and then I would be confounded by what the levers and knobs did and my husband would channel his six year old self and remember what his mum did to fix it when he was sitting by her when she was Smocking in the ’70s (now that is a film title). As all my former flatmates/roommates/family will attest I am not the most domesticated person so to find myself quilting on a mid-century Singer was a shock. I felt I was taking my place among the women of the last century.

I sewed the pinned pieces together like a Tibetan flag.

Then I ironed everything all over again and sewed on the 8 inch cotton strips facing the other direction until I was left with a pile of big squares.

I should note that all this time I was under remote supervision from MQF. She supplied me with all the apparatus and was always there by text to direct me. I could tell how serious my mistakes were by the length of stunned silence before she would carefully redirect me. There was the Great Same Colour Disaster of ’13 where I accidentally consulted my eldest to discover she wanted no pink or yellow in her blanket. I went ahead with all blue until MQF had a bit of a meltdown and made me use a flashing as separator.

At this point MQF made me measure and cut every single bloody square all over again to make sure they were the most perfect shape. I was beyond fed up and nursing repetitive strain injuries from using a cutter. These were the doldrums of quilt making. Just on the cusp of a payoff but still in the midst of drudgery. It may have been during this stage that I was driving on Hunt Club on a miserable grey sleet skied day and I stopped at a light behind a grimy Ford F150 with the most horrifying thing in the back of his truck that I have ever seen. It was a massive old cylinder of some kind tied down with bungee cords and wrapped carelessly in a HANDMADE QUILT. I screamed like I’d seen a dead body. What poor mother had bent over her stitching probably by candlelight shivering as she sewed her own clothes into a blanket of love for her offspring so that one day a careless jerk would toss all that care into the back of his truck to stop a dodgy old boiler from getting scruff marks on his truck liner? Naturally I ran him off the road.

When you are repetitively cutting it would be easy to forget if the cover was on or off the blade or if you are using a ruler or hand as a marker. Somehow I managed not to cut off a thumb and bleed all over the place.

There was a significant amount of payoff at this point as the pieces went together in panels of either the alternating colour blocks or in the case of the other quilt the flashing separators.

Look! Panels! Along with more ironing of course.

From here I sewed all the panels together. This is where that whole measuring deal comes strongly into play. A quarter inch here and there leads to seriously wonky panels that don’t fit together. It is a bit of a late hangover in the process but a bit of stretching, pinning and ‘not being that bothered’ and it all works out!

And then I felt I was basically done. This led me to have a conversation with MQF that went something like this:

“I’m done!!!!”

“No you are only half way done. The batting and the backing and quilting stitches have to be added. I’d say you are about half way done.”
“Eff off”
“You are just a Topper at this point not an actual quilter. Don’t worry, lots of people feel that way.”
“Again Eff off”
“You can always send the quilt out to a quilter with a long-arm sewing machine.”
“How much does that cost?”
“Hundreds of dollars.”
“Eff off”
“Don’t give up. As your mentor and guide in this process I feel it is my duty to encourage you to keep going…Don’t give up!”
“Eff off. Eff off. Eff off. I didn’t sign up for this. I didn’t want a mentor. I need to be finished doing this now. I will just make the cover into a duvet.
“But what about it’s heirloom value? You need to finish it properly. You need to make it into a true quilt. After all this work you want to be able to pass it down through your family.”
“What? I never signed up to make an heirloom. I don’t care if my kids pass it onto their kids. I just wanted to get the BLOODY BAG OF CRAPPY CLOTHES OUT OF THE SODDING BASEMENT.”
“So come over and I’ll help you pin on the backing”
“Fine.”

You will notice there are precisely no pictures of this stage. It basically involved washing the giant piece of flannel backing so it wouldn’t morph into Dali-esque dimensions at a later date followed by a lot of pinning and then rolling up the layers so they would fit through a sewing machine arm and then sewing giant criss-cross lines over the whole thing. Then for the final border wrapping the ends all together I machine stitched on the border to one edge and then bent it over the side and had to hand stitch it on the other side to finish it.

Both quilts are on the kid’s beds just waiting to be passed down to generations of people who will perhaps one day need to move a dodgy old boiler.