A Decade's Worth of Procrastination

(My college roomies will enjoy this!)

12 years ago, during the same Christmas break when Casey proposed to me, his mother helped me pick out a pattern and fabric for a quilt (she’s a great quilter).  Choosing the right pattern was important because I didn’t have a sewing machine at the time (she got me one for Christmas a few years later) so I needed a pattern that could be done mostly by hand.  So we chose a pattern called “Robbing Peter to Pay Paul” which was mostly hand appliqué.  Basically I hand stitched all of the half-circles on each square.  There are 4 half-circles on each square and the quilt is made up of 108 squares. Then the squares were pieced together with a sewing machine.  I’ve blogged before about my skillful procrastination techniques and, boy, was this a mammoth of a project to procrastinate! 

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the process, here’s a brief outline –

First, you piece together the top of the quilt.  This is the nice decorated part.

Then, you take the fabric you are using for the back of the quilt, a layer of batting (fluffy stuff for the middle) and the top and sew the three layers together with long, loose stitches.  This is called basting and it holds the layers together during the quilting process.  These stitches get pulled out after it is finished.

Finally, the quilting - these are the tiny stitches that run all over the quilt.  You can hand quilt or machine quilt.  Hand quilting instills an heirloom quality.  Machine quilting is faster and good for quilts that will face repeated washings and rough treatment (good idea for kids’ quilts).  Wanting to maximize my opportunities for procrastination, naturally I chose to hand quilt…

I can’t remember exactly when I finished the top of the quilt and basted it together, but it was either before Coulson was born, or when he was still an infant, so I’m going to guesstimate it around 7 years ago.  Well, it turns out, hand quilting’s not really much my thing.  My barely quilted quilt sat around for years.  About a year ago, my mom was going to Florida to visit her cousins and I knew that one of her cousins was a huge quilter.  So I tossed my project in my mom’s car and begged her to ask her cousin to finish it for me.  Then I forgot about it…

So I was super excited to unwrap this at Christmas!  12 years worth of procrastination and finally outsourced, but my quilt is finished!!!