Finishing a quilt top is a great feeling and definitely a milestone in the quiltmaking process but “getting to the quilting part” from there is not as direct as one would think. How do you know what quilting designs will look fabulous and “make the quilt?” How do you know what to quilt where? Sure, there are lots (like hundreds? thousands?) of quilt stencils out there, and I seem to have my own private collection of them, but for some quilts stencils just don’t cut it. Yes they make the quilt easier to mark, but how many times are you going to find the perfect stencil, in the perfect size and style, for a particular part of the quilt? Not many, in my experience. For some quilts, you need other tools: pencils, freezer paper, rulers, compass, flexible curve, circle and feather templates, and ink pens. Oh, and erasers, lots of erasers. Let the intimidation begin.

Freezer paper is one of the essential ingredients to this torture. You know, that stuff that people who hunt their own food use to wrap meat? I’m no hunter, but I go through a wicked amount of freezer paper when I quilt. I use it for everything. The rough side makes great drawing paper and though it’s strong it’s also fairly thin, which becomes important later. You can just tear off a chunk in whatever length you need (great for long border designs) and when you run through the whole box, the grocery store has more.

What could possibly be intimidating about freezer paper? It’s something akin to writer’s block, I think. This step in the long road finds me staring at a white piece of freezer paper, seeing a hazy picture of the quilted quilt in my mind and trying to get that picture to flow through my pencil onto the paper. I’ve said before that I’m not so good at designing my own quilting patterns and I’m not much of a doodler, at least with paper and pencil. So I’m staring at a blank sheet of paper Read the rest of this entry »

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Sometimes I think “everything I need to know I learned from my cats.” We should follow their example, and do what we do best:

This picture is remarkable, but obviously not because they’re sleeping. They’re very good at that part. No, what’s truly amazing is that they’re doing it together. They’re on top of my ironing board in front of the shelf full of quilting stuff, which is usually reserved for Patches alone. I have to help Shadow understand that frequently, since he usually gets up there to start trouble, not sleep. This evening I came back to the studio after dinner, and there they were on the board together. Definitely a noteworthy moment, since they’ve only been this close together (calmly, without the claws and teeth) for any length of time once before in the last year and a half. ZZZzzz…

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I finally finished up the satin stitching on The Misery Quilt around the medallions in the border! Woohoo! The borders are on, the corners are mitered, and I’m drawing quilting designs. Can’t wait to get to the quilting part!

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