Christina's Quilt

A friend of mine just had her 40th birthday, and my gift to her was a lap quilt. I asked her what colors she wanted in it, and she said black and pink. Pink!

As far back as I can remember, I have hated the color pink. So unlike any other color, pink did not exist in my fabric stash. As a result, I had to hit the fabric stores for the first time in ages. Turns out, there is a shade of pink that didn't make me want to vomit. In fact, I thought it was even....pretty. I just don't know who I am anymore.

I farted around with patterns for awhile, and ultimately decided to just do simple alternating squares and add some free-motion quilting to jazz it up. Which meant getting some pink thread. I am so unaccustomed to having anything pink that I actually felt self-conscious purchasing pink fabric and thread....like I was trying to pull off some disguise. It was odd.

Anyway, thanks to insomnia, I was able to finish the lap quilt in about two days. Two nights, technically. And I actually love the way it turned out:

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

That's it. No words of wisdom or thrilling anecdotes. I'm still on my first cup of coffee and feeling rather bland. 

 

 

Wool Quilt

I just realized that I haven't posted the picture of the wool quilt that I made. I think it was in 2010. As I mentioned before, I was first inspired to quilt because of a friend's wool quilt, so it's always been on my mind to make one myself. I didn't do nearly as well as she did.

It's about 6' x 6' of wooly warmth. Since wool is gigantically expensive (unless you happen to have a flock of sheep, which sadly, I don't), I collected my wool by going to Value Village and buying wool clothing. I honestly can't remember where the grey and purple wool came from, but the red was from a skirt that was actually damn cute. Since it was two sizes too small, I was happy to take my weight-gain angst out on it and cut it to pieces.

I used flannel as the batting and for the underside of the quilt, I used another piece of wool that I had hanging around. It's ugly, but I had a lot of it. For the binding, I used black flannel in case the edges touched my face. Wool makes me itch.

The finished product wasn't horrible. Honestly, working with wool was harder than I thought it would be. My machine balked a lot. And I used cotton thread which was stupid considering how heavy wool is and how much abuse the seams take. So naturally, it's coming apart in places.

Still, while the picture makes it look like it's unruly and won't lay flat, that's just me being lazy. I had recently washed it and it was all frumpy-looking from the gentle cycle on my washer. And I wanted to take a pic for the blog and move on to the new quilt I'm making. And since I think I have one reader of this blog (me), I decided to not care a whit how the pic came out. Yes, I used the word "whit."

As far as functionality goes, this puppy is warm and heavy. If you like those things, which I do. Last night I actually put it over an electric blanket and heated every cell in my body to a boiling point. Lovely.