I've
just spent Christmas with my family and I've spent it quilting –
two activities which aren't usually synonomous. For most of us
quilting entails closeting ourselves away and for those of you who
use the dining-room table, Christmas is one of the few weeks when you
gracefully concede that its original use is for dining.
No,
I've spent the holidays with everyone else; me, my needle, my thread,
my little scissors and my quilt. Eight days later I have almost
finished quilting a single-bed sized quilt. I
have finally nailed it and got the stitching right. I'm thrilled
with the results, and even more pleased that I achieved this during a
holiday time when I usually hardly get anything done.
I'll
be honest, I can't machine quilt. I have machined lines of stitching
through quilts but they have always been straight or with just a
slight curve. Unfortunately back at the end of 2011 the pile of
finished tops was becoming a bit too big, so I bought a pair of
quilting gloves and vowed I would practice machine quilting almost
everyday. The 'almost' was my downfall. I think I practised twice.
Luckily
that Christmas I bemoaned my predicament to two experienced quilters
who politely heard me out and then said "But you don't have to
machine quilt if you don't want to." And there it was, permission to
ignore the gloves, the impossible task of fitting all that wadding
and fabric through a tiny space, the tangled threads, the back ache and the frustration – I was free.
I
am still confounded as to why I needed this 'permission'. Why as a
mature adult and an experienced piecer did I feel that I had to be
able to machine quilt?
Once
you decide to go the route of big stitch quilting, similar quilts and
even tied quilts begin to quietly pop up in articles and books. You
just have to keep an eye out for them. Really there are lots of
people doing them. There among the quilts with beautiful tiny
hand-quilting are those whose stitches are larger and a little bit
more flamboyant.
This
is what I'm doing – no frame, no hoop, just the quilt in your lap.
I've even given up on marking the lines. All of us intuitively know a
quarter of an inch space and the seam lines in the piecing are the
grid to base your design on. You can change colours and threads as
you wish. On this recent quilt I've been using number 5 pearl cotton and
a huge needle. You quickly find a rhythm and the needle dictates the
size of the stitches if you allow it to. I will admit that after the
first day the side of my thumb was excrutiatingly painful.
One
of the nicest things about quilting this way is the contact with your
material. I've been wondering why we choose quilt making over other
forms of creativity and expression and I've decided that it must be
the fabrics. However, we normally select fabrics quite quickly, take
them home and put them into the stash, cut them up and piece them.
After the initial choosing we very much take them for granted and
keep them at arm's length.
Sitting
over the course of a week, methodically stitching through the squares
of fabric I have made emotional connections with all those small
squares: there's a fine corduroy which is soft and the needle glides
through, there's a black print through which I have to tug the needle
and it still gets stuck, and there's a row of squares with a pink
and turquoise print which make me smile everytime I sew through it.
At
the end of each day I fold the quilt and the golden lines of
stitching amongst the basting are more numerous, and there's a deep
sense of achieving something beautiful. It hasn't taken that long to
quilt, eight days, and I haven't been stitching all the time. But
these eight days I have also spent with everyone else, not on my own.
Big stitch quilting takes a little bit of initial courage. It's a
step into the dark. I often take out the first few lines of stitching, but every quilt is getting better and more surprisingly being
stitched more. The first quilt was a lesson in minimalism whereas
this quilt has lines running all over the place, and there's the added
bonus of a wholecloth quilt on the back.
So
in the spirit of a New Year raise a glass to big stitch quilting –
but remember to put your glass down a long way away from your quilt.
