A Bluestocking Knits

This went together with a very satisfying quickness — not error-free, mind you, but well in time for the gift-giving next week.  The colors are very pleasing to my eye. 

I still have my old 1980s Kenmore sewing machine, which doesn't extend to anything so grand as a walking foot, so the quilting is only widely-spaced straight lines down the "stacks", but the wideness gives the quilt a pleasing fluffiness, I think.

I wasn't very impressed with my ability to cut a straight edge — my tendency to try to be frugal and not waste any fabric tipped over the edge into skimping, and the backing fabric actually came up short on one side, so that I had to trim off a bit more than I really wanted to, which led to a series of snips here and there that seemed to make things worse, not unlike trying to cut your three-year-old's hair, snipping a bit here which makes that bit crooked which necessitates another snip there, &c. &c. &c.  And in another instance, although I was taught by my mother and grandmother to always, always, cut off the selvages, I have begun to absorb the much-earlier practice of using as much of the fabric as possible — maybe selvages don't pucker as much as they used to in Grandma's day, I wonder to myself, I've usually been all right — I thought I had measured carefully enough that these would be just inside the seam allowances, but one slipped somehow, so that my shame is there for all to see.

I thought, rather desperately in a dark moment at the end of a long day of making edging strips and laboriously pinning and re-pinning and hand-sewing the first long edge and a corner, that I have enough fabric left to make another quilt, I could use this one for day-camp and make another one, with straighter edges and no parsimonious white selvages, one that I wouldn't have to make excuses for — "sorry about that wobbly bit there."

And then when I woke up the next morning, I knew that this isn't mean to be a showpiece or a prize-winner, it's meant to be used, for the baby to nap on, or the new mom to nap under, to take to the park on a sunny day and not mind if it gets dirty or spat-up on.  It's okay.

And I really do love the colors, the different shades of indigo and brown, the little flecks of lighter shades here and there that give it both a liveliness and a kind of serenity.

I had thought of piecing a quirky back, but this is just plain, a big piece of Linen Look, the sturdiness of which I have been very happy with in other projects, and comes already wide enough to need only a single cut.  The edging is a lovely coffee-brown Kona Cotton.

So there wasn't really much "process" involved here, and it does look a bit more "homemade" than I quite wanted it to, but there it is — I will embrace its imperfections along with its beauties —