Year of Making Stuff: Week 22

The story of a quilt:  I signed up at my quilt guild to make a twin sized quilt for the new Middle Way House that is opening in the old Coca-Cola bottling facility in October.  I had fabrics picked out (Thiên, some of them should look familiar!) and a pattern in mind.  But I forgot the pattern at work on the evening that I decided to start cutting the fabric.  A prudent person would have either a)gone and gotten the pattern (I only live one mile from work) or b) waited until the next day.  But I am not a prudent person.  So what did I do?  I started cutting from memory.  Ha!  Of course I remembered incorrectly and have added one tiny piece to each block.  Instead of each 4″ block being made up from 5 pieces, each block is now made up of 6 pieces.  This doesn’t seem like a lot, but once you consider that I have to make 360 4″ blocks, it does.  At 6 pieces each, I have to cut 2,160 pieces.  I could have saved cutting 360 pieces!  I will never include 1″ pieces in a twin sized quilt again.  It just takes too damn many of them.

On the other hand, this is a quilt going to a facility for women to sleep under who may have left a bad situation in the middle of the night with their children and the clothes on their back.  Women who  hopefully can find little pieces here and there and put their lives back together again.  Maybe it only seems like a little tiny piece, but the idea of picking up the pieces really does make sense.  It is a quilter’s metaphor dream come true.  I can only hope that sleeping safely for the first time in a long time under a hand made quilt would be one of those tiny pieces that they can use to rebuild.

So internet, it isn’t completed.  But I finished cutting the remaining 2,160 pieces today and I am calling that finished for this week.  I also put together 4 of the 360 blocks so you can see what it looks like.  4 down, 356 to go.

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