While the rest of the world leaves the office to have a beer at 4PM CDT, I continue to work. Yesterday, I was put the finishing touches on my crazy quilt.

OK OK, full disclosure here, after Ty and I went swimming and had a picnic lunch at Beaverfork Lake yesterday, I came home and finished the quilt. (This is probably why I look so tired and shoulder-tastic in the the pictures.) Every day for the past week, I woke up and said, “Today is the day that quilt is getting finished.” Other things kept coming up. My mother visited, a new computer, laundry day, you know how it goes.

Work for this quilt started in 2003 when I began cutting up old pieces of clothing to try out a bargello technique. I started working on it again in 2005, and then the crazies fell in in 2008. Yes, they may call it a crazy quilt because it looks crazy, but after completing this one, I can now confidently say you may actually have to be crazy to start one.

In showing the quilt to a couple of folks, number one question is, “Where did you learn to do that?” As with most things, I didn’t really learn directly. When I was in elementary school, every Saturday, the local PBS station would have a show, “Sewing with Nancy”. She did a bargello show once where you take these long strips of fabric, sew them all together, and then cut them the other way and stagger them in a wave. When she cut them into equal pieces and staggered them at equal lengths, the show was pretty boring, but then she must have had a few cocktails and started cutting at willy-nilly widths and sewing at irregular intervals. It was compelling TV.

As for the the rest of the sewing and quilting, I used the book Denyse Schmidt Quilts: 30 Colorful Quilt and Patchwork Projects.

The book is very helpful, but leaves a lot to the imagination. A few pictures or diagrams of the actual quilting stitches would have flattened the learning curve more. I am still clueless about machine quilting and walking foot quilting. Guess I am going to have to google it. The part on basting/pinning the quilt sandwich and starting stitching from the center was very helpful. I also stitched this quilt much more than I had to, but I really like the results.

In other news, I’m really excited about the new Naughty Secretary Club book coming out:

The Naughty Secretary Club: The Working Girl’s Guide to Handmade JewelryNew book link if your reader blocks it. The Naughty Secretary Club is an awesome jewelry maker out of Austin, Texas. For years, she has been coming up with inventive jewelry, mostly made out of recycled bits of paper or plastic mixed with clear epoxy. Recently though, they’ve been on the bleeding edge of the “revamped vintage” trend. Bookmark this site for great hand made gifts. The book comes out in August, and I’ll be waiting with my toxic epoxy and resin chemicals and molds to figure out how to do this stuff the “correct” way!

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 28th, 2008 at 8:30 am and is filed under quilting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.