{blogtober day 9} missed it by this much

My quilt making style, it seems, has more in common with my motorbike loving, revhead teenager, than it does with most normal quilters. If he’s not flying past the house through the vineyards at speeds that raise my heart rate and make me grey faster than he’s riding, he’s sound asleep (or moping on the couch trying to convince me ‘out of fuel’ is a good enough excuse for an unplanned town trip). If I’m not taking a decade or more to complete a simple sampler, I’m knocking out a quilt in 24 hours. There is no in-between, for either of us.

So when I caught the bug Friday afternoon, knowing that the quilt I wanted to make had a tight turn around, I decided to roll with it. I’d done it before, and that time with toddlers hovering about. With teenagers it would have to be easier, right?

Well, yes, but also no. The kiddo side of things was a lot easier, absolutely. What I didn’t factor in was off-grid life and an overcast day, meaning I had to pull up stumps somewhere around 8.30pm Friday night. Bright and early Saturday morning I was back into it though, and by the time I had to head out the door for the first round of mum duty, I was so close to a finish I could smell it – just the binding to attach then stitch down.

In between practise sessions, I managed to run home and get the binding attached, and then set myself for a day of watching and stitching. The last end came around faster than I thought, and I went home with the small amount left in the last photo of the gallery above.

By 5.18pm, I had the last stitch in. 26 hours, 7 minutes from fabric pull to finished quilt – not quite a record, but not a bad effort.

As soon as I decided I was going to make it, I knew straight away I wanted the two rows of triangles; not flying geese, though, 60 degree triangles, which gave me a chance to finally bust out the triangle ruler I bought forever ago and still had plastic on it. As I sketched, the squares and lines came together, and instead of measuring and calculating, I decided to run it improv style, cutting the triangles, squaring the off, laying them out. I marked the outer edges on the floor in painters tape. The squares were next, joined in a row, laid out with the triangles. Join the triangles, fold the peach for the strip, work out how long I wanted that. Place, cut, sew, press, place, repeat. Slowly slowly it come together, until all that was left was to work out the size of the centre square and pull it all together.

When I went fabric diving, I found a cute cat print in my stash – the recipient’s favourite colour is green and she loves cats, so it was quite a serendipitous find. Using this as my base, I pulled a fun grey triangle print for the background, taking the last two metres on the bolt just to be safe. A pale green dot for the squares and then a darker green for the border. The peach was from stash. A mid grey homespun was the final pull, to use as the main backing.

A quilting plan wasn’t immediately obvious, but my enforced overnight break gave me space to sleep on it, and I woke up knowing what I wanted to do. A mix of squares, lines, and angles, and I am really happy with how it all came together in the end.

The recipient cried when she opened it. That, friends, is what we call a successful impulse project.