A long, long time ago, I promised my husband I would make him a quilt. I imagined piecing together a stunning design using some interesting fabrics of our joint choosing.
Of course, that's not what happened.
He decided he wanted a whole cloth quilt made from retro cowboy fabric. This is the leitmotif of our bedroom decor. I buy a handmade lampshade, he finds a garage sale shade fashioned from scenes of the wild west. I hang fabric in embroidery hoops on the wall, he imports a guitar to the corner. I find a vintage cotton woven bedspread, he counters with a request for a cowboy quilt. Our bedroom, with its "matrimonial eclectic" design could look strange to outsiders (if they were even allowed to peek in) but we are happy and rarely even notice how odd things are. (There is a lot of debate these days about what constitutes marriage, but I think this sort of sums it up.)
Back to the quilt. The fun part is choosing fabrics, designing the pattern and piecing. Quilting and binding it all together are the sewing equivalents of weeding the lawn. And after some quick calculations and the sewing of a center seam, that's all I was left with: drudgery. I put off the hours of pinning the layers together for about a year. Then, it was a couple of weeks before I quilted the parallel lines. Next, I procrastinated putting on the binding for a few more months.
One reason I put it off so long is that my hands are not strong enough to hand sew a full quilt binding on. It's pretty hard to sew the binding on by machine so that both sides look good, but I developed a technique that works pretty well. Any quilt binding avoiders out there interested?
So, now we have a quilt to put on the bed. It's not that beautiful and it doesn't really match anything, but I have upheld my promise, my husband loves it, and it's great to sleep under. Plus that machine-sewn binding is never going to fall apart.
