We've also been going back and forth on the size of the bed we plan to have once we move into the Spartanburg fixer-upper house we bought back in May.
We've finally decided on a king size bed, so I sewed the last panel back to the quilt top; back in July, I had taken that panel off. On my way to work on Tuesday, I stopped at Foam and Fabric--they sell wide fabric for quilt backs, and I decided that it was worth the cost so that I didn't have to sew the back together.
Yesterday morning, I was ready to start quilting. Because Summer Quilt Camp has less attendance than other times of the year, I was able to use extra tables to make the quilting of the king size quilt easier. I spread out the backing fabric and then the batting and then spent time figuring out how to position the top.
I spent yesterday quilting the middle of the quilt. I wanted to make sure I got that part stabilized in case I couldn't complete the project during this retreat.
People dropped by my station to take a closer look. Before I close up the project, I thought that I, too, should preserve a closer look. I'm not only quilting by hand, but I also sewed the whole top by hand.
It's a lot of sewing, but it's usually done when I'm watching T.V. or chatting. It's often part of my self-soothing tool kit, which doing it by machine would not be. I've also done other projects along the way. It's taken a long time, but I haven't really noticed.
This morning, I went back to past blog posts, and here's the one where I see the project that inspired me, back in the Fall 2022 Quilt Camp. By January, I had made some progress, documented in this blog post. Along the way, a friend showed me that I didn't need sashing between the squares, and that decision made the assembly of the top much more fun.
I spent one Quilt Camp putting squares together on design boards in search of the perfect flow of colors, which I then sewed together, only to realize that I didn't really have enough for a queen size bed. I sewed more squares, and when I returned to the project, I put squares together into long panels more randomly, which worked just as well.
Quilting is never my favorite part of the project, at least not bed-size projects. It's hard on the fingers and the back--and other muscles too. But with this project, I've had an unexpected benefit: the chance to return to all those squares, to marvel at the differences in scraps included, to delight in all the colors and fabrics in this quilt.
Onward to Day 2!
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