14 Years in the Making

She made me finish it. (BTW, have you updated your feed for her new blog yet?)

It’s a double wedding ring quilt, completely hand-pieced, hand-quilted, and hand-sewn.

I started it 14 years ago and spent about 2 years getting it pieced and mostly quilted. Then life sort of got in the way and it went into a box and was hidden away in the basement. About 8 years ago I came across it and decided to finish it, so I got the rest of the quilting done.

But then I was faced with the binding. Because of the scalloped edge of the double-wedding ring pattern, I needed to cut bias strips for the binding, and it wouldn’t exactly be a piece of cake to sew it on, with all of those curves and “V”s. I didn’t want to do it.

So back it went in the box, and once again was banished to the basement.

Then a couple of weeks ago, I was chatting via email with our (newly-engaged – yay!) Kitten about her quilting projects, and I told her about my sad, unfinished quilt. She told me to pack it up and send it to her, and she’d do the binding (heh… she didn’t know it was a double-wedding ring quilt).

I admit, the offer was very tempting. It could finally be done! I thought I should at least find it and make sure that my memory was correct, and it really was done except for the binding, and that it was still in good condition – and it was.

Fortunately, I came to my senses and realized how selfish it would be to take her up on that extremely generous offer. After all, I’ve got tons of free time–while she works full time, has two active boys, a new fiance and her own projects to be done. I decided to put on my big girl panties and just do it.

The bias binding strips didn’t really take all that long to cut after I figured out the instructions for the continuous tube bias binding. (I was much too lazy to bother with the math to see how large my fabric square needed to be, and I had far more fabric than I needed, so I just made a square that was as big as the width of my fabric. Yes, it was way too much.)

Even though the quilt had all been hand-sewn, I was going to take the quick way out and machine-stitch the binding to the front of the quilt. But between my crappy sewing machine and those “V”s between the curves, it was a nightmare, and I resorted to hand-sewing instead. It took a lot longer, but it ended up being much less frustrating. And I think the “V”s turned out much nicer than they would have if I’d done them by machine.

But now what?

I don’t have a place for it, and it doesn’t really go with anything in the house. It’s not even colors I would have chosen, since it was originally intended to be a gift. It’s kind of funny that I’ve made three hand-pieced, hand-quilted quilts, and none of them were for me. (I had always wanted to do a wholecloth, white-on-white quilt for myself.) Oh well, I guess I get this one by default. Since I’ll probably never make another, I suppose it’s good that I have this one. For now, I’ll leave it in the living room to snuggle under while sitting on the couch. Then maybe it will end up going back in the box. o.O

I owe Kitten a big thank you for kicking me in the @ss and getting me to finish it. At least the monkey’s finally off my back.