The BIG one

And so to the last of my holiday gifts. One I may have alluded to here. It started out innocently enough with a pile of neatly cut triangles in very thin cotton. 110 isosceles triangles to be precise.

The there was much cutting of random strips of black and red fat quarters. Then sewing, lots of sewing, to create 110 string pieced triangles that looked a little like this.

Then there was more precision cutting of triangles, more sewing and pressing and piecing to create a top that looked a little bit more like the spiderweb I was going for. There were borders made and sewn on, an improvised back pieced together. Basting, quilting and binding. Acres of hand sewing. And then there was this.

The pattern inspiration and cutting templates came from a book, "Scrap Quilts from the Depression", that I picked up in a secondhand store in Vancouver. The pattern calls for 20 octagons (160 triangles) for a queen sized quilt but since I was aiming more for a cuddling-on-the-couch sized quilt I made the top from 12 octagons.... OK, so you got me. I made it from 12 because I ran out of fabric to piece onto and the inclination to sew any more triangles after I hit the 110 mark. I was worried it would be too small with only 12 which is why I added the framing sashing. But saying all that, I really like the way it looks with the frame, and it ties the back to the front better. Or something like that.

After the front was pieced I went on a month long sewing hiatus while I slogged though an obscene amount of bioinformatic data analysis for my Big Scary Annual Faculty Meeting, after which I was left with four days to finish the quilt before I flew home. FOUR DAYS! I originally had a completely different idea for the back along the lines of the back of the Mod Sampler but after laying it out I realized that it wouldn't work without more triangles (see above as to why that didn't happen.) So instead I made a rectangular patch out of the remaining 14 triangles then sashed my little heart out, mimicked the final frame on the front and called it a good 'un.

I basted and quilted the sucker in one day. You may recall that my machine does not like quilting. With this quilt I discovered that my sewing machine prefers me to use a heavy duty denim needle and that I really, really, REALLY need to support as much of the weight of the quilt as possible to prevent drag, and then the thread wont snap. In fact it only snapped three or four times compared to the thirty or forty times it snapped before. I'd call that an improvement.

The next day I made and attached all the binding. I hand sewed the entire circumference in one afternoon. Basically I finished the whole damn thing with a day to spare. GO ME.

But after all that, what really matters is this.

I think they like it.