good night sleep tight

Sometimes, I procrastinate because a project isn’t speaking to me. Sometimes, it’s because it’s being tricky technically and I don’t have the bandwidth to work out the next step. And sometimes, it’s because the end of the project means something more than I’m ready to deal with. My most recent quilt finish, that took me over six months to complete; out loud I was blaming the techniques required. On the inside? A finished quilt meant being ready to pack my biggest baby off to uni eight whole hours from home, and I was certainly in no hurry for that.

But time, the heartless wench she is, marches on, and that moving date insisted on arriving whether I was done or not. And so it was, I found myself three days out from leaving and still stitching the label into place, and taking photos the day before we packed the car, so that it could be used to wrap up his computer tower.

Mama-heartache aside, it was also quite technically challenging, so there were definitely times when I procrastinated because it was all just too hard. Originally, I designed the layout out in procreate, and printed it out with the intention of improv-foundation-piecing. I managed to get the yellow stripe pieced like that, and then changed my mind. For the green ribbon, I tried improv piecing, just laying it on top of the printed pattern to make sure I was in roughly the right spot. The piecing went much faster, and so I went with that for the remainder of the ribbons.

Then came the background. Again, I was basically improv piecing. I started easy, with the yellow section. Creating the middle section was much trickier, making sure to line up all the overlaps correctly. By the time I got to the bottom, the sides were so far from straight it was crazy. It would all work out in the quilting, or so I hoped. There were a few bubbles and weird bulges, with all the different biases pulling against each other, that I also hoped would resolve in the quilting.

Continuing the whole “wing it and hope for the best” theme, I decided to do a loose walking foot quilting, following the lines of the ribbons, but not stressing too much about spacing. It gives a lovely loose almost organic feel to the quilting, and as hoped, it did indeed flatten out nicely, and give me a nice flat base from which to start straightening up.

Or so I thought. I took a break. I cracked out the rotary cutter. I pondered where best to start; where my tightest constraints were. I took a big breath, and I started cutting. The bottom. Up the side. Across the top…

It was crooked. By, like, A LOT.

Friends, I cried. Legitimately CRIED.

I tried to fix it, and it just made it worse. It was at this point I walked away before I completely ruined it. Coming back to it later in the afternoon, I decided to stop cutting, and instead took it into my bedroom, laid it out, and used the lines of the tile grout on the floor to work out where I went wrong and where to start with fixing it. Once I sorted that, I flipped it over, and started marking out the cut lines with tailors chalk. The first attempt was still wonky – by this point, it was obviously a me issue, and somewhere in sliding the ruler along the lines I was introducing a twist. It was deeply frustrating that I’d never had this issue before, and now I was struggling to draw a straight line on such an important quilt.

It was not the time for tantrums though. The clock was ticking. Moving day loomed. And I refused to let this precious boy of mine leave home without a quilt to snuggle under. So, onwards it was. I pulled out every ruler I owned, laid them end to end, and finally, finally, I was able to get it squared up. Squared with a frustrating amount of waste, certainly, but squared none the less.

The backing left me enough to use as the binding, and I think the black sets off the colours of the ribbons nicely. I made up a label with the little phrases that make up our goodnight routine, stitched it in place, and tried my best not to cry as I handed it over, and watched him wrap his computer tower in it and load it into the car.

We drove him to Sydney, carried it from car to college room, and bid him farewell. In the pile also was a new doona to make the room his own, in place of the uni-provided bedspread. And yet, when we video call him, the doona is still packed away, but that quilt I laboured and stressed and cried over, it turned out to be the first thing he set up when he unpacked, and is actively in use. A hug from home that he sleeps under every night.

I hung up from the video call, and then I cried all over again. From an 18 month old napping under a mama quilt, to an 18 year old clinging to the vestiges of home under a mama quilt; that this beloved one of mine still values my meagre makings is all a crafty mama could ask for.