This quilt is what I call my "MILLENNIUM LEFTOVERS". A great many of the fabrics in the quilt, in particular the 2.5 inch squares were aquired in a number of swaps for the purpose of making a quilt with 2000 different fabrics, so most of the fabrics in this are pre- 2000... I did make the millennium quilt that was the goal of collecting and it was complete before the end of the year 2000. There were still many more fabrics that I had swapped for that were either repeats or just were not chosen to fit in the Millenium Quilt.
Now, this Leftovers project did not start out to be full of quilt crimes but there it is, a quilt of criminal proportion!
What crimes were committed in the creation of this quilt?
# 1, was that the backing fabric, is a BED SHEET! - a blue floral at that!
Now, in my defense, I must say that it was a gifted sheet and it is 100% cotton. The QUILT RULE (who makes up this stuff?) says that you should NEVER use a sheet for backing a quilt. Why is that? The reason that you shouldn't use bed sheets in your quilts is because sheets are made of a much higher thread count than quilting fabrics and because of that it makes it difficult to hand quilt through it. My defence -- I machine quilted it and my machine did not complain at all!
#2 -- the backing bed sheet doesn't even come close to matching any of the fabrics on the front of the quilt.
What is the reason that the back should match the front in some way? I suspect it is so that you can spend time admiring more fabric in the quilt shops til you find just the right one, then buy 8 meters of it at $16.00 a meter... Or perhaps it does satisfy certain estetics when it comes to decorating rules or maybe even feng shi? Oh Well, ARREST me!
#3 This isn't even a proper quilt because it doesn't have THREE layers!
Sometimes you just don't want a regular quilt to snuggle under. Just because I live in CANADA doesn't mean that it is WINTER all the time. We do get summer, so this is a Summer Quilt. The purpose is so that on those extra warm nights, a regular quilt is too much, but if you have a fan running, a top sheet is not quite enough (it can blow off the bed if you have the fan at top speed! and then if you accidently open your eyes you have to look at the fat old guy on the other side of the bed!) A pieced top and a bedsheet sewn together makes the perfect summer quilt.
#4 This quilt was not quilted from the centre out, you should always start in the centre when you quilt!
I have to agree that in most cases this is true, but since I didn't put any batting in this quilt. I started at the top and simply lined up the top edge of the top and the top (torn) edge of the bedsheet. I do not have a quilt frame to lay out and stretch and smooth and line up everything. I stitched across the width of the quilt, every 4 inches and pushed and pulled and smoothed it as I went. As LUCK (was it luck?) would have it, by the time I got to the other end of the quilt I had no puckers or bumps or stretched bits.
#5 When you sew the binding down you should pin it all around and then hand stitch the back down so it is nice and even.
NOPE! I never pin my binding, never, never, never. When I flip it from front to back I stitch slowly and hold only about 4 to 6 inches then stop, fold over and stitch a bit more. Sometimes I think it is a rather slow process, but then I realize, I have not got stuck by a pin, or forgot to pull a pin out , and the sewing machine, even at a crawl is still 10 times faster than hand stitching. AND machine sewing the binding down makes it much much stronger.
#6 You should never let the dog on the bed when you put a new quilt on it!
WHY?
Then is it okay for the cat to check out the quilt? If you go and look at the quilt label photo you will see it has dog hair already on it, so no point in this house anyway to prevent the pets from enjoying a nice new quilt that they look GREAT on anyway. HAHAHAHA!
Hope y'all are enjoying the day and finding ways to create things whilst ignoring the rules!
