William's Quilt... Or... Friendship and Foolishness

It's hard to choose which quilt to talk about next because, since I started quilting, I've always had several projects going at once.  William's quilt was begun early in my quilting life, but it was completed a long time afterwards.  Should I order these posts by when a project was begun or when it was completed?

Can you see how difficult my life has become since I had the knuckle-headed notion to make this confounded blog?

I suppose that there is no right answer to this conundrum, so, per usual, I'll just do as I please.  Right now I feel like talking about the denim monster that I simply call "William's Quilt."

 This... is William.  He loves denim.

Remember my last post?  The one about the Denim Picnic Blanket?  I had an uncharacteristic lapse in judgment and showed it to William.

He's even more of a grouch than I am, by the way.  Hard to imagine, but true.

Even so, he actually likes some things, and denim is one of those things.  He was infatuated with that damn Picnic Blanket and asked me if I would make him something like it.

In my first lapse, I said, "Sure."



Then he said, "Make it king sized so it will fit my bed."

So I, lapsing again, said, "No problem, but you've got to supply the denim."

True to his new love, he went to a thrift shop that day, bought about three large trash bags worth of jeans and brought them to me.

Still young and dumb, I was actually excited about the project, so I began the long project of cutting up jeans.

Hours and probable carpel tunnel injuries later, I had a couple of totes full of denim.  Perfect!

Then I started to try and think about what I would do with all this crap.  It was a real head scratcher.  I made the command decision to set it aside and work on something else.  That suited me just fine.

Among the junk he brought was a pair of old, white painters jeans.  I kind of liked that fabric, so I thought that maybe I could embroider his initials on that and make it a focal point.

I haven't talked much about my sewing machines yet, and I won't go into detail here, but suffice it to say that, by this point, only a couple of months into sewing career, I had gone clinically insane.

I now owned three machines.

The first was a piece of junk that I won't even honor by saying its name.  May you rot in hell you cursed spawn of satan.  I struggled with the Spawn Machine to make the Virgin Quilt. By the time I was trying to quilt it, I was losing my patience and my already shaky sanity.







My second machine is a Bernina 350 PE.  It's awesome.  What I mean to say is Holy Moly.  I love this little guy.

Not long after I bought it, I realized that there were some things that I might want to do that it wouldn't, so I bought a Bernina 830.  Wow.  It's something else.  It's even more Holy-er and Moly-er than the little guy.

But... Back to William... Remember him?

(I'll take a small detour and mention the bib that he's wearing.  Somewhere along the way, my fiance' decided that I was a pig and needed a bib, so she found a pattern online and told me to get crackin'.  I made a few bibs from that pattern, then branched out on my own and made my own design.  I made one for William.  I love my bibs.  Someday I'll post about the wonders of a good bib.  Not now though.  Be patient, ok?)

I took that piece of white denim and made some giant initials on it, mostly to see if I could work the embroidery module on my new machine.

 

 

What do you know?  I figured it out

Then, I had to figure out what to do with it.  Building in my mind was the idea that I could maybe make a bursting pattern which radiated out from the placard with the initials.  It took me a while to complete because I was doing so many other projects by this time.  So William's Quilt took its rightful place upon the back-burner.

Ultimately, though, I got it put together...













Now, I was really stymied.  I had not a clue about what to do with this center piece.  I knew that someday inspiration would strike, but I certainly didn't know when.  Then, some months later, in yet another YouTube video, I saw this braid pattern and I saw the possibilities.

I made a test strip and measured it, so I would know the dimensions, and I drew a rough pattern in my notebook.

For a tour of my notebook, see Falling Mountain.

Then it was just a matter of assembling all of these braids into the pattern I created.











Of course, I had to show off my progress to my modern quilt group.








A long time later, the top was completed:














And then, it was quilted.  For the back, I used part of an old duvet cover.









About a year after I began it, I gave it to William.

He liked it.

It was a bit anti-climactic.

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TheCurmudgeon