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: Quilts take a long time to make. King size is big. Ironing for an hour or three in the middle of summer is deathly hot. Dress appropriately. My sewing machine is like roadrunner in that she either standing still or zooming at such a …

Setback My quilting epiphany inspired me to try a modest quilting project almost entirely from scraps of old jeans and corduroy pants that Brock and I were finished with. I made this wall hanging pocket quilt for a baby called Willa. I had the honour of being the doula when my good friend Julie gave birth to Willa so I wanted to make a special present for her. This quilt is made of scraps from three pairs of jeans, one pair of corduroys, two corduroy skirts (both of which were pants in a former life,) and one beloved jean jacket that I bought in Munich and wore to pieces. The only fabric that isn’t re-purposed is the dark denim around the edges and the backing. The quilt follows this simple pattern. Now I am onto my second quilting project and practically an expert (ha) so I figured I’d just freestyle it with a glance at my Gees Bend book here and there for inspiration. Also, my brain reasoned, I may as well make a big one for our …

Part 1: epiphany If you asked me a year or so ago about quilting, I would have said it was categorically not for me. The quilts I’d seen looked like design competitions with patterns elaborate almost beyond recognition. Hundreds of tiny swatches of perfectly matched and counter-matched fabric painstakingly selected in a fabric store from dozens of bolts at $14.99 a meter. It was a sport for ladies with money and time on their hands. These quilts never beckoned me to curl up in them. They said: this took a very, very long time to make. They said: careful, do not touch. I didn’t change my mind about quilting until I came upon a tiny postcard book about the quilts of Gees Bend. The colours jumped off the cover toward me. They were unexpected: dark green next to tangerine; red with pink. These quilts didn’t have the air of a pattern book or a fabric store. They looked whimsical, asymmetrical, balanced with an artist’s eye rather than a measuring tape. For me, it was an epiphany. …