Quilting until your fingers blister

It's not only unfinished knitting projects that I have in abundance. Oh, no! There are several unfinished quilts, too. Some are half-quilted, others have the top finished but haven't yet been sandwiched together with the backing and batting, and still others consist of cut-out pieces waiting to be sewn together.

While I like the piecing aspect of patchwork, and usually get the component bits sewn up pretty promptly, I lag when it comes to putting it all together. The process of laying the various layers out on the floor, smoothing them out nicely, centring them and then grubbing about on the floor with nose down and bum up while safety-pinning them all in place (trying not to pin the whole shebang to the carpet in the process) is frankly a drag, especially in a small flat. One day, I tell myself, I will have a whole room devoted to craft, with a massive table on which I could lay out quilts of quite unwieldy hugeness. But in the meantime, procrastination rules.

On Sunday I dug a quilt out and had another go at it. This is not the oldest of my unfinished quilts by any means – I started it only a couple of years ago, so it's positively youthful by my standards  – but it's for a not-far-off occasion, and I'm at last feeling some urgency about it.

First I needed to mark all the quilting lines on the top. Then I marked out a right-angled cross affair on the floor so that I could centre the back, which has a panel in the middle. Then I sandwiched all the layers together, and lo, if it wasn't like doing my tax or going to the dentist – not fun, sure, but a whole lot less painful than I expected or remembered. I did need to go and sit on the balcony for a while in the middle of the process, to let the blood drain out of my head and back to the rest of me, but I finished it in a couple of hours. As with the tax and the dentist, relief and a sense of achievement followed.

I started quilting it that night too. I love the look of hand quilting, but I'm not all that enamoured of the process. I don't mind it, so long as it doesn't take too long, but I can't imagine ever making an heirloom quilt with an intricate pattern of tiny stitches. Life, my attention span and my temper are all too short. I'm quilting this one with quite long stitches, partly for expedience, and partly because I'm sewing through four layers (the top is appliquéd) with No 5 pearl cotton, which is thick and takes a fair bit of dragging through the fabric, as I'm finding. My fingers are quite sore from four days of on-and-off quilting, but I'd rather put up with the pain than use a thimble – they are just too cumbersome and I've never been able to get used to them. I can't use a quilting hoop either, so I sew with the quilt flat on the dining table.

What do you think, dear readers – enough quilting, or should I echo some of the lines
and do more? Comments and opinions welcome.

The stitches are getting a bit smaller as I go along and get used to the rhythm, but that's okay. I like the way it's turning out – both the rustic look of the stitching and especially the fact that it's looking closer to finished. I've been working from home most of this week, allegedly – in truth I've been ducking out to do some sneaky quilting from time to time. I still need to decide what to do in the border, but at least now I feel confident that the worst is over and it will be finished in time. More photos once it's all done.

Just before I wrote this post I was idly examining my sore fingers, and found that they are actually blistered. Does quilting until your fingers blister put you in the realm of extreme craft? I'd like to think so.