This rectangle of flannel has been with me for years, I have used it as a blanket when camping and on long bus rides when the air conditioning was cranked way up. For a while now I have been contemplating transforming this into a quilt or garment and finally I am going to share this experience ...
The inspiration came from a visit home last May. While the rest of my parent's house has a very cohesive look curated by my Taurus mother (shades of green, ceramic art for decoration, plenty of potted plants). The upstairs bedroom where I stay has become the repository for all things eclectic and is where our familiar collection of quilts live. There is one made by my maternal great-grandmother (more in the crazy quilt fashion), one made by my paternal aunt, quilted pillows crafted by my mom, and another my sister made in her high school course.
It feels so nice to go home and be surrounded by these intentional items created by my ancestors and relatives and I wanted to be part of the tradition. Making a full queen sized quilt really intimidates me - so I am taking a baby step and will be hand sewing this shawl/quilt for many months to come.
To start out ~ I rummaged through my big basket of scraps and began selecting the pieces that hold a specific memory for me. Some are off-cuts from clothing projects, others are textiles I collected along my journeys through central & south America.
I want to keep to a grid pattern, more or less, but besides that the only rule is that the fabric included holds a memory of a place, a project, or an important person to me.
For example ~ the three patches bellow are an off cut from a needle book project, a scrap from a roll of fabric I bought from a family of weavers in Guatemala, and a piece of traditional Andean fabric that was left over from making our current table cloth.
With a few pieces selected I began cutting the scraps into rectangles, more or less the same size. As most of these textiles are already cut into strange shapes, I am not going to be overly strict and rather with the design, letting the pieces of fabric tell me where they want to be in the quilt.
My three cats have a habit of sitting on all of my sewing projects, so I don't want to have a long term project full of hundreds of pins lying around. Instead I am going to work from one corner to the next, laying out a few patches at a time and sewing them by hand. If I sew on four patches in one sitting that will be a success!
(Note to reader : I really should iron these patches before sewing, but, I don't have a ironing board and usually iron over a stack of old towels which is not very aesthetically pleasing and thus I didn't include that step in this tutorial)
To keep with a fun and eclectic theme I will be sewing with magenta embroidery floss. If you are in more of a hurry you could totally sew this with a machine - but I am reading Little Women right now and find the idea of hand sewing a while each day very romantic.
Day by day - *and especially during winter months as I sit by the fire *_ I will be selecting patches, pinning them in eccentric combinations, and crafting this quilt that I am sure I will cherish in years to come. Maybe it will even be passed on to future generations of the Calendula clan, of that I dream as I stitch.