Quilting 101

I was on my way out of work after a stressful week in the office, when I received a text message from one of my guy friends asking if he could use our sewing machine. At first, I chuckled wondering what he needed to use it for, but then he explained that it was for a t-shirt quilt.

I headed home, picked up the sewing machine and arrived at his house around 6:30pm. We went to dinner and then went to Wal-Mart to pick up some things for this quilt. I am not domestic in any form of the word. I can cook well, but sewing is absolutely out of the question.

We headed back to his house and started on our adventure. We realized we had forgotten some things for the quilt, so we had to leave again and ended up at Joann's. It was literally the blind leading the blind. Fortunately, we found some clear grid plastics that we took two and taped together to make a 16" x 16" square. We didn't think that we would need any more than one fabric cutter, so the last of the 36 squares were quite fun to cut out with a dull blade.

We began a process that he would cut, I would iron and this went on for a couple of hours. Towards the end of the cutting of the squares, we realized we had to thread the bobbin. I started on my attempt to thread the bobbin, which turned out to be disastrous. I resorted to watching a video on YouTube, which I have to admit was extremely helpful. I can now say that I'm a professional bobbin threader.

Threading the entire machine was another adventure. I had my guy friend thread the sewing machine as I cut out some more squares. He fortunately took Home Economics in the 7th grade, so he's much more experienced than me. After we laid out the squares in the order of the blanket, he started sewing the rows together. As he would finish a row, I would have the next row ready to sew and this took a couple more hours.

2am rolled around and we ran out of Navy thread. We decided that there was a 24 hour Walgreen's down the road, so we got bundled up and headed out to the snow covered streets. Luckily, Walgreen's did have spools of thread, but our options were limited to white or black, so we opted for black.

We then headed back to the house and began sewing the rest of the rows together. It was good having two people handling the quilt, because the quilt got extremely heavy at the end.

At 6am we were finishing the edges and extremely proud of our awesome accomplishment. We had one more edge to go and were finishing the corner, which were pretty tough, because of the thickness of the batting and material. The last stitch on the second to last edge, was extremely difficult and the needle ended up breaking. We called it quits, because by then it was 6:45am.

He fortunately finished the quilt yesterday!!! I definitely can say I feel much more domestic after our quilting marathon. Next time, I'll spend more than one day on the quilt.