A king size project: Part 3

Queen of the king

So I made a king size quilt.

There were many contributors to this quilt:

• Scraps from five pairs of jeans and three skirts
• Fabric left over from a couple of sewing projects
• A couple of cheap roll-ends of denim and linen
• Almost a kilometre of thread, all told
• About 300 safety pins to hold the layers in place for sewing
• My knee capillaries who had the blood squished out of them and endured bruising after several hours of pinning and ironing on all fours
• The musical talents of Gillian Welch,  Ryan Adams, The National, Joni Mitchell, Iron and Wine, TV on the Radio, Andrew Bird, and Lucinda Williams
• The storytelling capacity of This American Life, Radiolab, The Moth, A Prairie Home Companion, and The New Yorker Fiction Podcast

Here are nine things I learned while making this quilt:

1. Quilts take a long time to make.
2. King size is big.
3. Ironing for an hour or three in the middle of summer is deathly hot. Dress appropriately.
4. My sewing machine is like roadrunner in that she either standing still or zooming at such a speed that the needle is a blur. No slow speed options for this crazy gal.
5. Look at the road, not the roadrunner. When trying to sew straight along the seams at breakneck speed, it’s best not to look at the needle. Instead, arrange the fabric, and hold it steady but then go into a zen-like state where you have soft eyes that see only one line where two pieces of fabric meet.
6. It’s okay if you only achieve this zen-like state for half of the seams.
7. It’s also okay if the seams consist of a great many tiny stitches that do not look hand sewn at all. My sewing machine lacks an adjustment for a longer, hand-sewn looking stitch. The only way I have found to achieve the longer stitch is to pull the fabric through quickly so that the needle doesn’t have a chance to poke quite so many holes as she fancies. This is not possible with a massive bulking quilt hanging about you and only two hands.
8. Slippery fabrics such as viscose make lovely flowing skirts but behave very badly in quilts. Despite the numerous times you stretch them out, iron and pin them they find a way to wiggle around like little jellyfish.
9. Sewing a king size quilt may become a full time job, but it is probably not good for your mental health to let this happen. You and your quilt need time away from each other.  You need interaction with other human beings. Your sewing machine is not a human being or a bird.

We’ve tested it out, and it’s a great west coast summer quilt, which was the intended purpose. It’s thin, but all the heavy fabrics give it a substantial weight, which I like. Best of all, even the biggest quilt hog couldn’t make a dent in this thing. It’s so big that it hangs off the edges of out bed right down to the floor. We could fold it in half and still have enough quilt for two.

I may not actually be done with this quilt. I’ve sewn the layers together along the seams, but I may do more quilting on top of the layers. The batting I chose is a thin layer of cotton with a recommended quilting distance of three to five inches. This means that as it is, the batting may shift when the quilt is washed, which would be sad. I think quilting more on top would look beautiful, and more “quilty”, but right now I’m kind of enjoying not doing any quilting at all.