Slow Sewing: The Making of a Quilt

Hey! I made a quilt.
This has been a looooooong project. The joy of making this has been in the slowness of putting it together. I think if I had rushed it I would have been heartily sick of it by its completion. As it is as I have taken so long over it it has been a joy; completed in short bursts over a long period of time. How Long, you might be wondering? Well over a year!

This is the story of my quilt, and no it's not as long as it took to make.
When I went to my first #sewupnorth event in Leeds TWO years ago I won a couple of fat quarter packs in the raffle. These small pieces of quilting cotton were so smooth and the colours were just stunning I knew that I would have to use them somehow. I'm not a quilter so the thought of cutting and piecing the fabric, let alone quilting it filled me with dread. However, after the fabric had sat in my stash for 6 months I decided to give it a go.

I cut the fabric into wide strips and then stitched the strips together to create very long strips. Then I cut these into narrow strips using my rotary cutter and metal rule. Once cut, I rotated the strips, which meant unpicking a seam or two to create the stepped pattern you can see in my quilt. I sewed with a 6mm seam and pressed as I went along. Once I had completed the top I had a long rest until I could face quilting it.

I did not want to use polyester wadding for this quilt as I have been trying to cut down on waste and my use of plastics and the cotton batting was out of my price range. Instead, I used a couple of old flannel sheets for the wadding and the backing and binding fabric came from an old cotton duvet cover that had a rip on one side where it had become a little threadbare. The other side was fine, so this became my backing. I layered the backing, flannel sheets and quilt top and pinned together using safety pins. I know you can buy special safety pins for quilting, but I found the safety pins I had already were perfectly ok for the job. I rolled the quilt into the middle from the edges and secured the rolls with offcuts of flannel and pins. this gave me a 30cm wide strip to quilt. I gradually unrolled the quilt as I stitched it.

I decided to try free motion quilting and used my trusty Bernina 707 to do this. It's easy to drop the feed dogs on this machine and it has an extension table for the machine which provides a bit more support, as I was working with a large amount of fabric at a time I did most of the quilting at our monthly Crafternoon events as I had access to a larger table to support my work.

Unfortunately, I found it very tricky to keep my stitch length constant and even, but the overall effect is ok and the quilt feels nice and firm. This process has taken a long time and I've put this down for a couple of months before picking it up again. Last week at our Crafternoon session I finally finished the quilting.

During this week, I trimmed the edges of my quilt and cut 10cm wide strips to use for binding. Yesterday I sewed up the binding strips and stitched it to my quilt. Before beginning this I did a bit of research into how to mitre the corners, as on my last quilt this was unsatisfactory. There were loads of tutorials on Youtube and they all had basically the same method for stitching the top. Once I had stitched the binding to the top. I folded it under and finished the underside with tiny fell stitches. This took a couple of hours, but I find hand stitching quite relaxing and meditative (as long as I don't have to do too much of it).

Finally, I have a finished quilt and have saved a couple of flannel sheets and a duvet cover from landfill so I'm happy. Those of you who are expert quilt makers will be able to pick a boatload of mistakes with this. I don't care. It's been an achievement for me and because I've taken my time with it I have actually enjoyed it. It really is worth slowing down sometimes.