all I want for Quiltmas {blogmas day 10}

Last christmas, I started a quilt, but the very next month, I packed it away. This year, I pushed through my fears, and made up some frankenbattiiiiiiiing.

Ok so I’m not a lyrical genius, but also, sorry if you now have an ear worm.

I joined Quiltmas last year, for the simple reason I loved the fabric kit. In hindsight, the idea of a festive, seasonal quilt, for an Aussie christmas is a little bonkers. This week, 11 days out from Christmas, we’re going to be pushing 40 degrees (or 100 in the old measure, for those unfamiliar with celsius). Who the heck needs a quilt in those kind of temperatures?

And yet here we are, the second summer in a row, and I have the quilt out, taking over floor space, as I contemplate quilting it this year. I had big intentions of getting it done over winter, so I could just display and enjoy it over Christmas, but since July I think we’ve had maybe four normal weeks? Not four contiguous weeks, mind you, just four weeks in total. It’s been a hot mess of a few months, really, and quilting has been on the bottom of the list – especially quilting for just me, when there are uni quilts and hospital quilts to make. As I hustle through advent, though, and try and make some magic, Quiltmas was high on my list. I just want it done and out of my WIP box.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks is I planned to make frankenbatting for it. Frankenbatting is a low-waste technique in quilting, where you take offcuts of batting from other projects, and join them up to create a whole new piece ready for another project. I’ve never done it before, but have a massive box of wading offcuts and leftovers, and I thought this would be the perfect project to try it out on. Worst case, if I don’t like how it turns out, it doesn’t really matter because it’s mostly a decorative quilt that won’t actually be used on a bed, so if its a bit lumpy or uneven, no-one will ever know.

The piece I used was a big L shape, so I was able to cut the end off and join two pieces of the same batting, which meant I didn’t have to factor in any changes in weight or thickness. On my machine, I selected a basic zig zag, left the length as it default, and made it as wide as I could – on my Janome MemoryCraft 8200QCP, that was mode 1, stitch 11, width 9. I used my standard walking foot, lined up the two edges, and got to sewing. I didn’t trim the edges or anything, and there was only one spot where the edge probably wasn’t quite neat enough and didn’t easily butt up against the other, but overall it worked fine.

As I sewed I had so many regrets. Even just doing the batting, I was sweltering, and started wondering if I’d made a bad choice adding it to my list (yes I had). It’s been curled up in a corner of my bedroom ever since, so today’s job is to press the top and backing, and if I can get it basted, I’m hoping to take over the school room while the children are away and try and power through the machine quilt portion of a morning in the cool.

That’s the plan. Let’s see if I can follow though, or if I’ll get stranded on the lounge with a coffee and my book each morning until it’s too hot to quilt…

Prefer to video version? I have one of those too!