Saturday, March 21, 2009

Little by little

Well, I figured something out.

I like making quilts for a couple of reasons. I especially like making quilts with my favorite colors... blues, turquoise, yellow, green. (You never would've guessed, right?)

But I even enjoyed making this quilt, which is mainly reproductions of vintage pastels.

Pastel? Not in my normal vocabulary!

But I liked making it, and here's why. I completed it, and I can see it finished, and it stays done. Unlike most of our "mom work", which is incomplete, invisible, or very rapidly undone.

I still have a stack of bills to pay. The floor I mopped this morning already has little brown footprints on it. The clean clothes I folded and put away will soon be dirty. The boys will be hungry. And the 'fruit' from the hours of teaching and training are often hard to see in the midst of daily life.


But my little quilt is done!

It's destined to be a baby gift, and is made with the scraps left over from this quilt. I meant for the fabrics to look very randomly dispersed, but of course I had to tweak "random" a bit, to make it look like I thought random should look. I really like the striped binding. :0)


This is the back. I know... kind of shocking. Actually, the colors are not really so saturated in real life, nor so contrasting. The greens and blues run together with turquoise between, more like a watercolor, and less like an aerial photo of Minnesota.

So, as Gunnar says, "Wa-WAH!"

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I could practically hear the "wa-WAH"! (I so get that kid...)

So, do you do this on the machine, or by hand. I want to learn to quilt! These are beautiful! How long does it take you to do one? One did you learn?

(Is that enough questions for you?)

Herding Grasshoppers said...

Okay...

I took an introductory quilting class. VERY helpful, especially for someone like me that never took a single "home ec" class. (Or whatever they call it now.) People who are good sewers could maybe learn from a book. I like having someone SHOW ME.

I have a sewing machine and do all my piecing and quilting on the machine. Once in a long while I'll do a little applique, or quilt a small shape by hand, for detail. Also, I finish the binding by hand.

I have to work on them in little chunks of time, what with taking care of the kids, homeschooling, and keeping the house together :0)

But the boys had a PTO day yesterday. I already had the pieces cut, so I was able to finish it in one day. Mind you, it's little, about 37" square, and a very simple pattern.

Doing little quilts is rewarding because I can finish them faster! I'd like to do a big one, for our bed sometime. If I did, I'd probably hire out the quilting, because quilting something that big is hard on a little machine. But people do it. Maybe I'll get better at it =P

There's a great website with lots of quilts and tutorials, at
crazymomquilts

Anonymous said...

awesome! I'll go check out the site! Thanks!

The dB family said...

You are really making me want to quilt!!