Last spring, a finished rag quilt was posted on Scrapshare. I looked at it and thought, hey, even I could make one of those. I've long admired quilters but always been concerned about straight lines and points meeting up - you know - accuracy issues. But rag quilts look so forgiving. As I've blogged previously, they are less forgiving than I thought.After reading about rag quilts on About.com and mentally redesigning one based upon two different patterns they use, I ordered the fabric. This first involved searching for the PERFECT Florida State fabric. Which I finally found at Suzanne's Quilt Shop in Moultrie, GA.
The fabric arrived. And then it sat, as I was paralyzed by the "what ifs" of cutting and sewing. Well what better way than get started said I than to make a practice quilt. Thus Rag Quilt 1 was born. Upon learning that the baby would be a girl, I pulled some of the blue out and substituted pink, resulting in a stack of already cut blue squares, thus Rag Quilt 2 was born. These were also influenced by the purchase of the Rag Quilt scissors as I need to use them in more than one project don't I???
This one is a little more complex due to the triple rail blocks and the four patch blocks which exponentially increases the number of sandwiches to prepare. To maintain my sanity, I created strip sandwiches and sewed the fabric/flannel/fabric along the long edges. Afterward, I cut the rails and patches. The seams for the short sides were sewn when I joined the pieces together to complete the blocks. I also did a better job with setting up my stacks for the chain piecing. The quilt came together very quickly, especially as I didn't have to stop to set seams along the way.
On the other hand, snipping took forever. When I learned that Suzanne and Christopher were going to join us for a day at Disney over Gus's birthday, I moved up my deadline for presentation of the quilt from Christmas to a time when I could give it to Christopher myself - and so that he can enjoy it during football season. There are probably still snippets from the quilt at the timeshare in Orlando as I spent several evenings snipping and snipping and snipping. This one I washed three times and I really like the fuzziness of the ragging. | |
| A boy and his quilt... Hopefully Christopher will enjoy this for years to come. |
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