I made this little tabletop quilt for my mom for Christmas. I don’t think she was very impressed. Which to be honest I’m not totally surprised. It’s sort of ugly. It’s the only present I made this year, which is a good thing since it took me waaay longer than I planned. And that was doing a really sloppy job with it. I hate to think how long it would have taken if I’d actually used some precision.
You can see my truly awful hand quilting and poorly matched piecing in the photo above. In case you can’t tell, this is a very small kaleidoscope quilt à la Paula Nadlestern. I own these two books.
While I find most of her quilts visually jarring, I think her piecing concept is a little bit of design genius. Her process suits me because you “design as you go”. I find this a much more enjoyable type of piecing than “regular” quiltmaking where most of the designing is done at the beginning and then the rest is just production.
Unfortunately, you get pretty sketchy results when you scale the whole thing down to 8”x10” and don’t have hours and hours to spend searching through your piles and piles of stash for the perfect combinations. Despite, you know, what would at first glance seem like a lot of choices.
I have crazy stash.
I did rediscover just how much blue and white fabric I had purchased six years ago with the idea of making a full-size kaleidoscope/snowflake quilt. We’re talking dozens of yards. I collected the fabric and then I put it aside for a “better time” to start working. Then I got distracted by making clothes.
Once while I was shopping in the now-defunct local quilt shop one of the women there asked me why I didn’t take a machine quilting class that I’d expressed interest in.
“I don’t have time,” I said.
“Why not? What are you doing?”
“I make a lot of clothes.”
She literally “tsked” and shook her head in disgust. “Why are you wasting your time on clothes?” she asked. It was pretty funny.
Although she had a point.