Back to Back

I'm still not quite settled in the new house yet, but luckily I was a quilting fiend before we started packing up the flat.  The pictures you see here today are some of the last taken in our happy little flat on Fingal Street.  Sigh.

Once the top of the quilt was finally pieced together I had a better idea of the measurements needed for the back.  Although, to be fair, I have yet to actually take any measurements in this entire process.  There has been a lot of eye-balling-it and relative sizing.  Hence the repeated wonkiness to my sections.  A lesson learned perhaps.

While creating the three back sections, I repeatedly attempted to get some of the horizontal stripes to meet up in nice corners with neighbouring stripes.  This was not successful even once.  No amount of 'measuring' or ironing prevailed in my attempt at some kind of symmetry.  I won't lie.  It was driving me a little batty.  But one can only unpick so many seams before one says, F**K IT.

As it happens, I needn't have bothered.  The three strips weren't wide enough to be attached directly to one another.  I needed to make some vertical strips to act as buffers and add a few more inches to each side.

At this point I was pretty sure I was scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of t-shirt scraps.  I had already plundered the supply to make the last stripey bit of one of the vertical panels, what was left was never going to produce enough fabric for long strips.

But then I remembered the one circus shirt I didn't cut up.  For whatever reason, when slicing up pieces for the back, I left one white shirt untouched.  I couldn't tell you why, then.  But now I was thinking perhaps it was divine intervention.  Someone somewhere knew I would need some buffer fabric.

So for the first time in the entire project, I measured before cutting to ensure I had enough.  Carefully pinned and sewed and viola! Three sections which when sewed together, would be the right size.  Brilliance.

It took another week for me to actually sew the three pieces together.  This I did hastily, on the floor, about a half hour before heading out to yoga class.  Something in me suddenly needed to get these pieces sewn together.  It was a do or die situation, completely irrational.

Check out my pin overload.

First quilt photo in new house

Now both sides are done.  What's next?  I think this is the actual quilting part.  I need to source some 'stuffing' for the inside and some safety pins to keep it all together and then the quilting begins.  I'm still a bit stuck on whether I want to do this by hand or attempt it on the machine or even what design to use.

Now it's getting real.