An indigo gallimaufry is all well and good, as is dreaming up the next project whilst suppressing the guilt about the Kaffe Fassett diamonds, but there is also the not-so-small matter of the forty-nine un-quilted square feet of this quilt still pending. If you have been reading here for some years I forgive you unreservedly for looking at this picture and thinking 'Surely not that old thing again,' because it it has been on and off here like a yo-yo. I bow to all those people who finish hand-quilting bed-sized quilts (including myself in a previous life) because it is a massive undertaking...
This the largest quilt that I have attempted and started last century in good time for the new millenium as I recall. I chose good quality fabrics and expensive pure wool batting ( the wadding sandwich in the middle) which is like quilting butter, but fifteen years on the quilt is in a bit of a sorry state. Not helped by hanging it unfinished in the dovegreyreader tent at Port Eliot each summer where it always looked lovely and was much admired. If unfinished quilts had a voice this one would tell you that it has been the silent listening backdrop to some memorable speakers...Edmund de Waal, William Fiennes, Robert Macfarlane, Helen Rappaport, Gillian Slovo, Brian Selznick...
Spot Martin Parr and the quilt...
But it was exposed to the vagaries of the Great Outdoors, the damp, occasionally the mud, insects galore and the indignities of transportation in a wheelbarrow. If I ever finish the thing it will have to go in the washing machine immediately and there are running repairs to be done before I ever get that far, but I still love it, and loving a quilt is an essential trick to finishing it.
The so-called Millenium Quilt (I might rename it) evolved from a book, Around the Block by Judy Hopkins which was one of the first to give very clear and precise measurements for rotary cutting a multitude of traditional American blocks. I chose each block for its name in order to create a quilt that would be a celebration of our home.
Milky Way for the centre block and for our night sky which gives us the clearest view of it..
I worked on the quilting of this centre years ago and stitched it to within an inch of its life. Along with accurate piecing it was one of my rules for this quilt, masses of quilting...
Silly rule, I have amended it slightly.
There are twelve surrounding blocks, all with appropriate names...Sunnylanes, Summer Winds, Autumn Tints, Fox and Geese, Flight of Swallows...
Then I cheated and added in six inch wide borders to make the quilt bigger for less effort.
Less effort??
What on earth was I thinking...six inch borders a potential nightmare of acres of monotonous quilting to be stencilled and then stitched.
And so it has sat there...and sat there. Sometimes folded up and out of sight, sometimes 'around' as a prompt to get on with it, except I could always think of something else I would rather be doing...until now...and suddenly I am back on it.
For those that don't know of these things, the best method is to start quilting in the centre and work outwards. The Milky Way was pure quilting joy back in the days before I wore glasses for close work. The stitches are tiny, the thread is fine but then I hit the first of the six-inch borders...less joy, before reaching each single block, great joy. I am now working my way around it very slowly...a bit of border, another block, more border, and with a plan for all the quilting designs in my mind I feel as if I have it within my grasp at last. These things can feel like acres of Impossible Wilderness without a strategy.
With those small indigo pieces I had my quilting eye back in especially with the Aurifil thread (Mako 12) which is a dream to use and this week I have had Flight of Swallows on the hoop..
Forgive the remnants of marker pen which will disappear in the wash eventually but I love to do the less predictable when faced with straight lines, and the circles most definitely mirror the swallows flight around us here at the moment...babies in both nests and a regular feeding frenzy, new broods from elsewhere circling the house and clocking up the flying hours before the migration. An unexpected pattern emerged as I stitched and all to the French Revolution because having hoped to read A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel this summer I am listening to instead so there's some of our 'ilary being stitched into this quilt now.
And I am alternating that with Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins. The stitches are fair flying along now, eating up the lattice strips....
And I have had a little helper too... a Dowager purring gently at my feet; now in her twenty-second year, she's seen it all before of course.
But all of a sudden I am optimistic that there will be a Finished Quilt.
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