#66: Make a quilt (wherein the author considers abandoning her current profession to take up a career in textiles)

I love fabric stores. I could spend days in them. I love turning a corner and having a new fabric catch my eye and instantly inspire in my mind a fantastic creation. The only thing more passionate than my love for fabric stores is my wish that I could do justice to even one tenth of the projects that I dream up.

Fortunately, quilting is a fairly easy way for me to get my fabric fix, as it doesn't require too much skill and allows for the pairing of multiple fabrics in one go. Picking these fabrics out, comparing their various tones and patterns to find the perfect combination of harmony and contrast, is my favourite part of the whole quilt-making process, and may go towards explaining why only a small portion of my quilts ever get finished.

This 'thing' will definitely take close to the full 1001 days to complete, as my aim is to produce a fully functional, queen-sized 'real' quilt. I'm super-excited about it and think that, as long as I don't hold myself to any unrealistic expectations of its final form or quality, it will turn out quite well.

The pattern for the quilt that I've chosen is here and looks to be fairly simple, although time consuming.

Unfortunately I couldn't seem to capture the fabrics on film to properly do them justice, but here is my best shot:



I've found (through frustrating trial and error) that the best way to keep my quilt pieces organized over the course of the process is to clearly label the various sizes/shapes and keep them in baggies:



While I have gotten a little more diligent and thorough about following all the proper steps in quilt-making, one habit that I doubt I'll ever break is cutting enough pieces to start the first block and then diving right in. The feeling of sitting in front of so much beautiful fabric and then being told to spend several hours painstakingly cutting tiny squares instead of getting to actually put needle to cloth is, in my mind, much like being told to carefully fold and put away wrapping paper before being able to see what present you got.

So instead of taking the time to cut out 320 3.5" x 3.5" squares, 100 2.5" x 2.5" squares, and 80 4.5" x 4.5" squares, I only cut what was necessary and went to it. Here is the first corner of my first block:



This is less than 1/4 of 1 of 20 blocks that will be needed to create the final quilt. A full bear-claw block looks like this:



I'm hoping that I can average 1 block a week, meaning I'll have all the blocks in about 20-22 weeks. Add in another 3-4 weeks for sashing and binding and the quilt top will be ready by sometime around August. And then, my friend, the actual 'quilting' can begin. Ack!