Fall is well and truly underway here in London so it seems a fitting time to add the stuffing to my quilt. After the distress of last week, I bit the bullet and ordered some wadding online. I was tempted to head into an actual shop and have a little feel of all my options, squeeze the cotton, maybe wrap myself in a bolt of polyester to check snuggability, etc. but then the fear set in. My complete and utter lack of knowledge on the subject in a shop full of women nattering on about loft, drape, and scrim was a recipe for my walking out with way too much or none at all or ending my quilting adventure forever because I lost the will to care.
So I went for the gloriously anonymous online quilt shop with no questions asked. Of course there were a million options there as well so I used my father's method and sorted by price. This brought me to the man-made section, which normally I would avoid, but this section included 'recycled' wadding. Sticking with the spirit of re-purposing materials, I went with wadding made out of 13 plastic bottles. My guilt over not recycling that evening's dinner's plastic waste assuaged, I waited patiently for my parcel to arrive on my doorstep.
The next step is figuring out how I actually want to quilt this bad boy. I have mixed feelings on the actual quilting, as I mentioned before, because the piece is two sided. Apparently this is not a common practice, or at least not to the extent to which I made this two sides different. My complete lack of research strikes again. Or maybe it's my knee-jerk tendency to go against the grain. Whatever the reason, it leaves me with a quandary. How to quilt this sucker?
In case you need a reminder, here are the two sides...
You'll notice that while both are divided into three sections, there is no correspondence between the sections. The two sides stand fairly independently of each other. I'm not crazy about the colour combination of the back piece or it's vast stretches of jersey.
I had a thought of tying the two sides together. Inserting little yarn knots or bows at corresponding junctures. However, the painstaking time this will take to try and figure out if there are any corresponding junctions and where they might be is too much to contemplate and I'm not sure it would end of as aesthetically pleasing as I hope.
Then there is the possibility of stippling which is apparently quite common with tshirt quilts and makes a kind of squiggly pattern over the entire thing regardless of shirt design or junctures. This treatment is a little too freewheeling for me so I don't think I will be going there either.
So where am I going? I think I have hit upon something in-between the two ideas. I'm not really sure it is going to work but like the rest of the quilt, I'm going to give it a go and see what happens.
Tune in next week for an update. I'll either be immensely proud of my idea or cursing my improvisational tendency.
Where would you go next?
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