Originally written Feb 25, 2024

Throughout my childhood, my family had a quilt-hanging shelf in the kitchen on which we would hang a different quilt, made by my grandmother for each season. This was during a time before I appreciated the work and artistry that goes into a quilt.

If I remember correctly, when I started quilting, my mother had suggested that she wanted a quilt to hang in the new house, with some specific color requirements to fit the decor style. This would be an easy undertaking, so I thought, as a wall hanging would not need to be nearly as big as, for example, the Labyrinth quilt I did for my cousin’s wedding.

When I give big gifts, I like to do exercise my creative ‘abilities’ and make something of my own for the recipient specifically. Of course for the Labyrinth quilt, I bought a pattern to make, but I had no experience with quilt making or quilt design. Now that I had that project behind me, I started experimented with a few designs using Quilt Assistant, a free software, focusing on the purple, gray and blue.

The prototype, titled “Waffleiron” for its woven grid pattern, was a simple 30″ x 30″ mini quilt. I used the concepts of creating a larger pattern using irregular ‘block’ sizes I learned from the Labyrinth pattern, as compared to the often traditional-style block quilt I was used to seeing.

I liked the choice of the two blue fabrics that make up the central grid and corner crosses. Unfortunately, the purple for the straight pieces did not stand out as much as I had hoped. It’s a good thing I did this prototype! I send it out to my great-aunt for her to quilt.

The second design was the final 60″ x 60″ wall hanging. I don’t remember any snags or issues during the design or piecing stage. The challenges came during the basting and quilting. To make basting easier, I tried the ‘noodle method’, in which the backing fabric, basting, and quilt top are each rolled around a pool noodle or pipe insulation, and then rolled out on a flat surface (first the backing, then the batting, and lastly the top) to create a pucker-free quilt sandwich. It went quite well, and I basted using safety pins as I rolled out the tubes.

Next came the quilting, which I wanted to do myself this time instead of sending it out. I got a quilting foot and templates, as well as lessons on how to use them from the lovely people my local fabric store. I also found a thread I liked, a blue and white multicolored thread which worked quite nicely with my quilt’s color scheme.

This thread became the bane of my existence for a short time. It kept breaking and snapping and getting too tight to work with. Turns out that pretty multicolor threads are quite delicate compared to single colored threads. Once I slowed down and took my time with the stencils, quilting got less frustrating.

The templates were a cool way to create large quilt motifs on my machine, no long-arm needed! But they can be hard to get right. You have to keep the speed of the stitching and the speed of your hands moving the quilt consistent to get perfect results. On top of that, knowing what template to use and when to use them was not my strength. I ended up with a mess of different quilt motifs all over the finished product. I kept it symmetrical, but it looks too ‘amateur’ to me now.

Looking at this picture of the center of the quilt, it doesn’t look so bad. But it is a departure from the traditional method of using the same quilting stitch over the entire quilt. What I’m learning about myself in quilting is that I don’t really follow ‘tradition’

Finally, I gave it a tag with its title and my name…

And after binding and putting an invisible hanging sleeve on the back, it was ready for gifting just in time for Christmas!

Problems and Lessons

1. This went pretty smoothly! The only problem I had was during quilting. There wasn’t much I could do to remedy the poor look of some of the quilting stitches, but I know better when and how to use the pattern templates, and when I should consider getting it professionally quilted.