A Finished Quilt Experiment

The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. --Eleanor Roosevelt

Our yard is not very good for growing vegetables. We have wonderful trees that provide shade, fresh air, and the whoosh of leaves to fall asleep to on a lazy afternoon. Those same trees, however, make it far too shady to make any kind of vegetable-growing worthwhile. At best, I might get a few chard leaves and wee mini beets, but I've come to rely on local markets to get vegetables. Might as well let them do all the work, I say.

However, our yard works very well for berries. They seem to prefer a few hours of sunlight and then the dappled shade to protect the fruit. Last year, I went on the hunt for some raspberry plants, but instead came home with a seedling loganberry plant. They're a cross between a raspberry and blackberry, apparently. And this year, they are starting to bear fruit. I was so excited a few days ago to see them starting to ripen:

And I picked these three beauties today. They're tart and fresh and a great size. And while the only real work I did with them was to carefully thread the branches along the fence, I feel quite accomplished by this result:

I am also feeling quite accomplished because I managed to finish my little quilt experiment today. I was going to wait until I bought some batting, but I decided I would just use some of the leftover quilted pillowcase fabric that I used last week as the batting instead. I spent some time this week learning about how to layer the batting and the backing fabric, and then I made a quilt sandwich with a layer of fabric, a layer of the quilted pillowcase, and then my cotton panel with my ink illustrations on top:

I read a lot about different ways to baste the layers together and decided that thread basting was going to be the best option for me. Even with the big stitches, I was starting to get excited about how this thing was going to look quilted:

I toyed around with the idea of trying to machine quilt this thing, but I am not that confident experimenting with my sewing machine. I decided to try hand quilting it instead. I really enjoyed it. It was surprisingly therapeutic:

Seymour enjoyed the process as well:

I was also pleasantly surprised at how quickly I was able to finish the quilting. This is what it looked like this morning. I started it on Friday evening and spent a couple of hours on it each day. I trimmed the edges and got ready to put the bias tape along the edges:

Except I realized that the tape I had bought was going to be too wide for the project. I sat with my chin in my hands and pondered for a while. Should I wait until I could get a thinner tape? Or should I try to make some myself?

I was so impatient to see it finished that I decided to take the existing tape and cut and press it to size:

Never have I been so eager to iron something in my whole life:

And voila: it is finished. I find sewing edges super tricky and there are for sure lots of wobbly stitches, but I am super impressed with the result nevertheless:

That was a very gratifying experiment. I plan to stitch some wide ribbon to the back upper edge to thread a dowel through it so that I can hang it on a wall, but after working on it for so long today I am glad to give it a rest for now. Sometimes, it's best to quit while you're ahead.

And now, I shall park myself on the couch and do something I am much more familiar with: watching tv and knitting. Have a great week!