A Bluestocking Knits

I've had these thirties and feedsack reproduction fabrics in my box for I don't know how many years, over ten at least, maybe close to fifteen — I used to go to Tall Mouse with the girls and let them choose fat quarters to make into napkins for their lunchboxes or for the big "Turning Twenty" coverlets I sewed for their beds, and it was like a candy store, looking at the different colors and setting them on one of the tables to decide.  I always found the thirties prints cheerful and managed to accumulate quite a number of fat quarters, as well as yardage from other shops, and a few years ago I said to myself, "I really need to make a thirties quilt with all of these."

I decided eventually on a disappearing nine-patch, inspired by the last post from Wool Palace Mary and even more by this one (which is lovely), and I cut my fabrics into four-inch squares and sewed up a nine-patch block to get things started.

And there it sat, for nigh on three years.  Why?  I don't know, it just didn't speak to me.  I'd see it in my fabrics box, think, "I should make some more blocks for that," and put it back.

Then not long ago, after receiving Amanda Jean Nyberg's Sunday Morning Quilts for Christmas, and looking through her alas-now-dormant blog, I happened to see a vintage crazy-rails quilt that inspired her to make a similar one for herself, and I thought, "do it!"

So I cut my four-inch blocks into 1 1/2-inch strips, and chain-stitched three at a time into blocks and the blocks into strips.  I decided to just let it go randomly — that's the "crazy" part, as rail blocks are usually arranged with the colors symmetrically or at least in the same order — and so I had only a general rule of not repeating a fabric in its neighbor blocks in the strip, but sometimes that just didn't happen.  "Oh well, it's 'crazy,'" I shrugged, and carried on.  A couple of times, sewing blocks in the twilight, I inadvertently put one strip wrong-side out, but I left some of them, too.  "It's 'crazy'!" 

I ended up with seventeen strips of thirteen blocks each.  This didn't seem quite big enough, so I found some Kona Cotton in "Bone," a sort of creamy off-white, and cut 5-inch strips for a border, which makes it now about 47×58 in. (say 119x147cm).  I thought at first glance that I wasn't going to have quite enough of the grey-and-white polka dots fabric for the back, but after fitting in the disappearing-nine-patch block — had to, of course — and piecing here and there, there is actually a goodish piece left over.

I made some scrappy binding using Amanda Jean's tutorial here (saving the leftover triangles because, yes, she does have a use for them, the fabulous "Up and Away" quilt in the Sunday Morning book — you can see a reader's version here at Running Thimble).  The paisley fabric is one of my favorites.  Also the cherry stripe.  Also the white daisies on yellow, which is left over from my favorite apron — and you know, ordinarily I'm not much of a yellow fan, but this makes me smile every time I look at it, and you can't ask more from a fabric than that.

I found some natural-white yarn in a drawer — it might be Kroy sock yarn — and Julia helped me tie the quilt, although she drifted away after only a couple of rows, whereas I found it rather meditative.  The yarn frayed more than I expected in the wash, so I might have to redo it later with pure wool.  Sewing on the binding took less time than usual, a pleasant surprise which I at least partly attribute to using 100% cotton thread instead of the more-common polyester.

Obviously, more than a few of the fabrics were going to end up next to each other in the rows, there being quite a number of strips from each fat quarter, but … it's crazy!

My piecing is still a bit erratic in places, I'm quite aware of that, but I was very impressed with the fact that almost every single one of the great-many corners matched up very neatly when I sewed the rows together, which was a nice little boost to my sewing confidence, and the new-to-me binding tutorial — Amanda Jean's method of joining the end to the beginning is a simpler modification of the method I usually use — went without a hitch.  And so on the whole I'm very pleased with this as a beginner-ish quilt!

It occurred to me, moving aside a bundle of jelly-roll cuts of fabric out of the way yet again, that I should just make something with the darned things and get them out of my stash box.  I had bought this roll to use for miniature quilts, as it contained a number of smallish prints and colors that already go well together, but the fabric frayed so easily that it was more frustrating than anything else trying to make 1-inch squares, that I gave up, and to be honest, the fabric is too rough anyway.  But I had seen somewhere, can't remember now, a quilt of strips sewn end-to-end, then cut to a fixed length and shuffled up in a random order, and so I thought, "right, time for a 'Stay-at-Home Jelly Roll'!" — the requirement being that I not buy a single thing. 

I had just enough pre-made binding in a relatively-coordinating color, and a package of polyester batting that I'd bought when I didn't know any better, still in a box in the garage that I'd forgotten about.  The back is a pleasant Robert Kaufman polka dot that I had bought online for a dress a year or so ago but decided wasn't quite right when I saw it in person, but is now doing sterling service as a backing material for various projects.  (The bonus bloom is Salvia mellifera that is enjoying the warmer weather we've been having for the past few weeks — the flowers are a bit unremarkable, but the leaves have a heavenly scent that actually wafts on the breeze, so I'm quite happy with it!)

A number of the jelly-roll strips were now half their original length — the ones I used for the failed miniature quilt — so I just laid them out to make sure the polka-dotted ones were distributed fairly evenly throughout, but otherwise I didn't do much "arranging".  I chain-stitched them end-to-end, which went wonderfully quickly, and ended up with just a little over 70 inches/178 cm in one long strip.  After some puzzling sums and divisions, I decided that 30 in./76 cm would be a generous-but-not-profligate length, so I cut a random bit from the beginning to help re-align the changes between the original strips, and cut the whole thing into 30-in. strips (adding in the bit I'd taken off the beginning somewhere in the middle, and rearranging another section so that one of the seams wouldn't be too close to the edge).  Then I tossed them all up in the air, and laid them out in a random order — this time I did tweak the layout a bit, so as not to have two strips with the same fabric next to each other, or too much of one color in a section — then sewed them up.  I've been making an effort to appreciate and enjoy the process and not feel that I need to speed-sew/knit/stitch, but I have to admit that this came together gratifyingly quickly!

After I sewed and pressed the whole top, I put it in the sink and swished it rather violently in hot water, partly to get it to shrink if it would, and partly in hopes that it would soften up a bit once the sizing was washed out.  I don't really get the don't-prewash method — maybe it's easier to get edges lined up when they are still a little stiff with the sizing, but it just seems utterly wrong to me not to pre-shrink, especially considering that some fabrics behave more erratically than others in the first wash!  I don't think these softened up much, though, as it happens — oh well.

I was debating with myself whether to attach the back of the binding by hand (which I prefer for the softness of the thing afterwards) or stitch-in-the-ditch from the front, when I noticed this zigzag variation on my old Kenmore.  I don't think I had ever used it before!  Since the whole point of this  was to be done and out of the way as quickly as possible, I seized the inspiration and sewed both sides of the binding at once with the zigzag.  The effect is actually rather handsome, as long as the fabric travels at an even rate under the sewing foot — you can see that it went a bit awkwardly along the top here, then smoothed out after turning the corner.  And I ran completely out of the blue thread about two-thirds along, first the bobbin and then the spool, so finished with a pale pink, just going with the improv vibe, as Julia would say.

So there it is, a bit on the small side, being 28×36 in./71×92 cm, but it's a lock-down project, needs must.  "What are you going to do with it?" David asked.  I said I'd probably just give it to the local Assistance League thrift shop, and David said, "Or you could give it to the Bs!" a co-worker of his that he's become good friends with in the past few years, who with his wife had their first baby in the early spring, a little girl.  "That's a good idea!  And it's pink-but-not-too-pink."

And a bit of the other Jelly Roll! —