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.

Brand new year, same old procrastination problem

If only I'd made a new year's resolution to neglect my blog. It would have been the sole new year's resolution in living memory that I've kept. This blog could be in danger of becoming my latest unfinished project (an irony too shaming to be borne).

Since I last posted I've started more new projects without finishing any of the old ones – why break the habit of a lifetime now? – although there's not much photographic evidence of any of them as yet. I've got one very large (and I think rather exciting) new project on the go, which I'm not supposed to blab about yet, so more on that later. Suffice to say that that's the main thing keeping me away from the blog recently.

That and work. I could get so much more done if I didn't have to go out and earn. That's one reason I like period dramas so much – the ladies seem to spend all their time swanning about in fetching frocks and doing craft. Never mind the likelihood of dying in your twenties from consumption or a two-day labour; before you popped your clogs prematurely, you'd at least have time to do a whole lot of quality needlework. Oh, the bliss. I've got all the right accomplishments for the wrong century.

The first new project that I've finished lately is a scarf for a friend's 50th, in Paton's Jet and 1x1 rib in two-row stripes. Subdued but rather handsome, I think. I hope he does too.

For the life of me I couldn't style this thing. I took about forty shots before I got this.
Yes, this is the best of them. Note to self: don't give up the day job to become a photographer.

And the insomnia project is also finished.

Despite my initial resolve, I ended up doing most of this in daylight. I did do some of it at night, with varying degrees of success. Trying to knit in only ambient light (that is, the light from the carpark next door) on the balcony at three am, while unable to sleep due to the insufferable heatwave we had about a month ago, resulted in a big fat mess of dropped stitches and general wrongness that all had to be unpicked in the cruel light of day. And then I ran out of the very expensive cashmere yarn about two centimetres from the end and had to buy more. Annoyance.

But the result is pleasing, I think – even if the styling, once again, leaves much to be desired. Still, I'm sure it will look much better on a human being than plonked awkwardly on the table.

The yarn is Morris & Sons cashmere. It's undyed. The colours you see are those of the goats who used to own it, and one of the brown skeins was slightly darker than the others, but I like that there is some natural variation to link it back to the animal that it came from.

This yarn was just lovely to knit with; so soft it has to be felt to be believed. Although 'felt' seems an inadequate word. 'Fondled' is much better.*

Scarves are great for in front of the telly (I'm watching The Tudors at the moment, and alternating between admiring the costumes and tutting at the often frankly silly dialogue), but now I need to get back to a real unfinished project – some quilting this time – as I'm on a deadline.  


* I just looked up synonyms for 'fondle,' and two of the suggestions were 'embosom' and 'inarm'. Don't you just love English? This is why I like working with words; there are so many interesting ones around that even after 22 years as an editor, I still come across unfamiliar terms all the time. (Especially when reading John Banville. He makes me feel like Uma Thurman's character in The Truth About Cats and Dogs, in the scene where she's reading two books at once: the book she's reading, and a dictionary so that she can understand the book she's reading. Try The Untouchable and see what I mean.)