Peace through quilting

Baby Quilt 4, originally uploaded by The River Thief.

No, that's not a typo, I do mean peace achieved by means of quilting.

Early this fall I got my act together and signed up for a quilting course at my local high school. "Bed-sized patchwork quilt" I think the class was called (obviously I hadn't written the copy for it or it would have been something catchier).

I come from a long line of quilters on my father's side of the family. New Brunswick farm women for three centuries, the oldest family quilts I've seen were my grandmother's. My Aunt May used to quilt on a regular basis with her women's church group, and my mother commissioned several quilts from them, although I seem to have only ended up with one of them, an appliqued Basket of Tulips quilt.

Since I never spent the time with my relatives learning how to quilt before they died, I had to take a class. And what a wonderful experience it was, ultimately. A six-week course spread over seven weeks since it was scheduled for Monday nights and the second or third Monday of the course was Thanksgiving, I think I spent the first four classes in a state of manic frustration. Class one was just handouts and instructions and material lists and looking at quilt samples and talking about quilting.

Class two was cutting and assembly class though, and that was when the craziness started. I had left the purchase of fabric and supplies to the day of class, which mean I not only had to find the fabric store in Coquitlam, I had to come up with a vision in my mind's eye of how the seven different fabrics would combine in the pattern I'd chosen. More on the store I visited in another blog post. The fabric also had to be washed to shrink it and ironed before it could be cut.

I spent the two hours in class that night cutting and then when I got home, despite the fact that my back was aching from bending over low tables at the school, I decided my kitchen counter was the perfect height and that I would finish doing my cutting that night. We're talking 15 vertical rows of 14 squares each - you do the math.

I finished cutting at 1:30AM. And then, for some bizarre reason, I decided I had to do the pre-sewing assembly that night as well. Two hours later (that would be 3:30AM), feeling like I'd cracked the world's toughest jigsaw puzzle, I was finally done and ready to sew.

It went on like that for several more weeks. I ordered wool batting from a local store (more on that later too) and they seemed to forget my order, plus the carding machine was out of order for a while. I finally picked up my batting and then I had to finish the quilt top before the last class. I had spent class 4 in complete and utter despair at the school machines - I think I spent an hour and a half of a two-hour class trying to get the machine properly threaded, too stubborn to ask for help, because after all, I'd threaded it properly the week before, hadn't I? I knew how to do this. (If the dead cow noises coming from the machine were any indication, no I didn't actually know how.)

I had bought my own sewing machine around the midway point of the class, realizing that I was going to need to do some sewing at home if I was going to stay on schedule, and also realizing that this wasn't a flash-in-the-pan thing: the patchwork bed-sized quilt from the class was only the first in a long line of quilts I was going to make. It took me a while to beat my own machine into submission as well - I must say, those elusive reading glasses have a nasty habit of hiding just when you need them most, and I have all new sympathy for my poor parents struggling to sew my skating costumes and waking me up at 2 and 3AM to thread the needle on the sewing machine for them.

After what felt like a superhuman effort in more ways than one (change of plan re backing fabric; addition of a four-inch border to make the quilt bigger, etc.), by the final class I was ready to do what needed to be done in the classroom: assemble the quilt sandwich using the large, waist-high tables at the school. I just don't have the floor space at home to do this, and my hardwood floors would have got all scratched up by the pins.

In true quilting spirit, one of my classmates helped me tackle the creation of the quilt sandwich. The wool batting is incredibly 'lofty' (read: thick) and I could have used some larger safety pins. However, we got it pinned and that's when the magic really began. Seeing the fabrics I'd chosen and assembled, the borders, and how the new backing, which was generous enough to pull around to the front of the quilt and form another 'fake' border, all worked together to create something of beauty and harmony - it was just magic. My classmates were so kind: I got compliments on design, fabric choices, workmanship, execution - and the instructor suggested I view my quilt from the other end of the room, insisting that I look at it like 'an oil painting or other work of art.' I was amazed.

That quilt still needs finishing - it's going to have to be a tied quilt due to its loftiness, which means I need some wool to form the ties and have to see if I can find a wool needle that's also really sharp to get through the two layers of fabric as well as the batting.

But in the meantime I started two other quilts, and on Remembrance Day finished the quilt top for my second cousin's baby quilt. I'm in awe of how beautiful it is, even though I tried to be careful with this one. I read the pattern it's based on fairly carefully and I drew diagrams on graph paper with coloured highlighters. I still managed to get the quilt's 'rhyme's scheme totally wrong at first, and was making blocks that went AB+AB=C rather than (A+A)+(B+B)=C for quite a while before I realized my error.

In order to get the dimensions right, and because we know the baby is going to be a girl, I decided to insert a couple of sashes in the pink fabric - originally the sashes were going to be in the blue spider and cobweb fabric as well. The quilt top needs another ironing, but I am thrilled and totally in awe of myself. There is something about quilting that draws on and challenges so many of my skills that when I get to the end of a project phase I'm just stunned by the accomplishment. Finishing the quilt top is one of those project phase milestones. And so I thought I'd savour it for a while.

This is a variation of the Pippa Moore (Kitambaa Designs, www.pippamoore.ca) quilt pattern "Five Part Harmony/African Harmony." I'm calling it "Three Part Harmony: The Baby Quilt."