The Gigantor Mending Project (Redux)

Yesterday I started what looks to be a rather big project. I began mending my grandma quilt. Every member of my entire extended family on my dad's side has a grandma quilt (well one at least). Every kid got one upon their birth--usually fairly brightly colored and always twin bed sized. Then everyone got one when they graduated high school (traditionally a blue jeans quilt--I have one of these too). And then when people get married, they get a full or queen bed sized quilt. I actually have one of those too because in the last two years of her life grandma finished a crap ton of them and gave everyone one.

All of my grandmothers quilts are hand tied rather than hand or machine quilted. Hand tying means there are little knots of thread--sometimes of decorative yarn in fun colors--that are sewn/tied through all the layers of the quilt). Hand quilting is when a stitch is sewn through all layers of the quilt using a long, strong needle by hand; this can be in straight lines or in curved and/or patterned lines. Machine quilting is sewing through every layer of a quilt and can be done in straight lines (often chosen if sewing at home on a smaller sewing machine) or free hand, but nowadays is most often done on large machines that use a computer program to quilt elaborate patterns into the quilt. Nowadays it is most often farmed out to people who almost exclusively do this.

As some of you know from here, I have taken up quilting. Although I am (for now) choosing to farm out the actual quilting unlike my grandmother who hand tied her quilt often with assistance from her neighbors, daughters, daughters-in-law, and occasional granddaughters. This is in part because our quilts are pieced together using very different manners of construction (again so far because I have done like 3/4 of one and 1/2 of another quilt using one pattern).

I have been using strip construction. This means kind of what it sounds. I cut strips of fabric out, sew them together alongside other patterns and colors of fabric. Then I cut smaller squares (about 10 inches each side) out of longer sections (up to two feet the long way) that trim up the squares to even lengths. Then all those evenly sized squares get sewn into a final quilt top. The final top then has many, many, many seams where different fabrics get sewn together. The machine quilting is a great way to bring out the beauty in the patterns, and it generally makes flatter all cotton quilts like those popular in the pages of Pottery Barn catalogs (although I have been picking much brighter colors and much bolder modern patterns).

My grandmother used block construction. This meant she cut squares out of fabric and sewed them together into bigger squares. She also did something that seems to have gone out of favor with modern quilters (yeah quilting has fashions that wax and wane who knew?). Her main squares were usually fairly big (10 inches square or 12 inches square) and were always white, and she would border them with a piece of solid and often brightly colored fabric. On these squares she would applique and paint designs. My big quilt she made later in life has butterflies with appliqued wings and painted antennae. The jean quilt is just plain squares of denim. The grandma quilt I got at birth has very 1970's Holly Hobby esque girls in bonnets with umbrellas with appliques for the skirts, bonnets, umbrellas, and faces and a bit of paint for the umbrella handle.

Actually I think my quilt is kind of ugly and I always have, and my sister has an identical one. Mostly I hate it because the quilt's colored border is a very bright mustard (think French's) yellow, and I don't really like yellow and I really don't like bad 70's mustard yellow. I appreciate it much more as an adult than I did as a kid. Mostly because I appreciate the skill and time that went into it.

However this quilt is now 30 years old, and it is kind of fragile. In part because of its age, and in part because it lived on my bed from age 2-13 and got washed a bunch as a result. In 2001 when I lived in NYC and was unemployed and depressed and spent most of my time watching my roommates movie collections and reading, I spiced my life up a bit by deciding to repair the tears in the applique and the opening seams. It took several days (but boy did I need shit to do!), and I am glad I did it. In the interweening eight and a half years it has only been washed a few times, mostly because it has lived most of those years in a box or up on a shelf and not out in life.

Lately Sam and I have been using it as one of our couch cuddling blankets. We have a nice cuddly sweater throw that is mine and he had a very beautiful but scratchy Pendelton wool blanket. So this blanket got pulled out due to its size and warmth, and since my grandmother passed away in 2004, it has been nice to have her things around me. But now it needs to get regular washing and some of my earlier repairs have failed or been compromised by the age of the thin cotton fabrics, so it is mending time again.

To mend it I go back in and do a simple invisible stitch on the seams that have failed. They are the easiest part to repair, but also the most tedious as you sew tiny little stitches over and over and sometimes for only an inch at a time. Mending the applique is harder as the fabric as worn out and pulled away from itself, so I go in and tack them down with the fabric. It is totally visible, but there is no other good option that wouldn't compromise my grandmother's original design.

Yesterday I worked on it for 7 hours (give or take, actually it might have been longer). I watched 4 episodes of Cold Case, an episode of Bones, two episodes of modern family (all on Tivo), the first act of Passing Strange on DVD, and Blade Runner (on Netflix on demand). I did eat some food in there, but mostly I sewed and sewed and sewed. I got done with 4 decorated blocks and all the surrounding border fabric. There are 20 blocks in all.

Yeah, this project is going to take a while.