How to Make a Quilt

After a long and fruitful conversation about quilts with my Aunt Heidi last night, I decided to post some pictures of my creations so that she and everyone else might see my handiwork. The longer I work on this, the more I consider myself a "Quilter," but I know I still have a long way to go before I become Accomplished at this art. Heidi says that my great-grandmother (her grandmother), whom we called Boodie, always wished she'd taken up quilting, and had stored away yards and yards of scraps in anticipation of that goal, but it never got used. Also, her mother, my great-great grandmother, was an excellent quilter and some of her work is left unfinished, never to be taken up by Boodie, though still kept ready to go in those boxes as well. My desire to learn quilting is fueled by an intense admiration of all the craft work Boodie did do, once upon a time, and a desire to emulate the cozy beds at her house with their hodge podge of sheet sets and scrappy quilts (which I now know were made by my great-great grandmother!).

First Quilt

My first quilt ever began with a quilting class at Santa Barbara City College. Little did I know then that our instructor was having us design our quilts in pretty much the most expensive way possible (short of buying Egyptian Cotton 1000 thread-count fabric!), but the results are nothing to sneeze at and the the techniques I learned are the true value.

The six blocks of my quilt.

We made "sampler quilts." A sampler quilts feature a variety of different traditional quilt blocks, and are unified by the repeating colors in each block. My colors are red and gold, which are derived from the "Focus Fabric," and are in turn used in each block and in the border of the quilt (see below). Each block also has a "background fabric" (in this case, it's off-white) that also serves as a unifying element. I had seen quilts that didn't use a background fabric, and I thought they weren't as pretty as those that did.

Here are the blocks with borders added and the setting in process of being attached.

I ended up adding dark brown borders around each block because the fabric for the setting was so busy that it muddled the colors and patterns of the blocks themselves. It's funny how that works out. You never know until you see it laid out and ready to go.

This is the assembled quilt top. Note the three reds (a dark, medium and light) and three golds (a dark, medium and light). In putting together the quilt top, I took care to arrange the blocks so that no one block or pair of blocks is constantly drawing the viewer's attention. Notice that two blocks have an octagon shape in them. These have deliberately been placed separate from each other. The same goes for the two blocks that have heavy amounts of pink. Finally, I placed my two favorite blocks in the middle row, because I love them.

My two favorite blocks, traditionally called "Rosebud" and "Cat's Cradle"

Fast forward a year later. Here I have laid out the "quilt sandwich": backing, batting and top.

First it is pinned.

Then it is basted with long, running stitches.

Then I hand quilted it. No need to shudder or cringe on my behalf; I quite enjoyed it and became pretty adept at making those close, tiny stitches that are the mark of good quilting (see below). This part took me about a month and a half, working a few hours every day while watching The Wire on DVD. I developed a tough little callous on my left index finger from catching the needle as it came through the quilt thousands of times. Certainly a mark of pride, for me.

Here is the back of the quilt, now finished. My quilting pattern was to just "stitch in the ditch" as they say. Rather than attempt anything more complex, my quilting lines just follow along right next to the seams between pieces of the quilt top. This is simpler and faster than curvy designs and I like the effect on the back, which now carries an echo, or perhaps a shadow, of the pieced design on the front of the quilt.

Here are my quilting stitches up close. According to my quilting book, an average quilter can do 6 stitches per inch, an "Accomplished" quilter can do 8, and a "microquilter" can do 14! After weeks and weeks of practice, I was doing between 6-8 stitches per inch. Evenness of stitches is more important than how close-packed they are, though.

Quilting has ruined store-bought quilts for me. Now I examine bedspread quilts in places like Pottery Barn and Bed, Bath and Beyond, and I am aghast and appalled. Many of these quilts, which they have the gall to charge over $100 for sometimes, have "quilting" stitches that are half an inch long and spaced 3 or 4 inches apart. It looks like they forgot to take out their basting! This is a travesty on the art of quilting.

Second Quilt

My second quilt is a "jelly roll" quilt, meaning that most of my fabric will come from two "jelly rolls," which is the trademarked term that the Moda fabric company gives to bundles of fabric strips. Each jelly roll has about 40 strips, each 44-inches long (the width of most fabric yardage) and 2 1/2 inches wide. A jelly roll usually contains one strip from each kind of fabric in a given line. My jelly rolls are from the "Park Avenue" line, and they were on sale.

A jelly roll in the wild

Alas, two jelly rolls is not quite enough fabric for the quilt I want (queen-sized bedspread with generous drop and pillow tuck: 96 x 102 inches!). So I collected a few more quarter-yards of fabric, which you can see folded up below.

All the fabric for my quilt top (save the border)

Fabric close-up

My design is intended to give the appearance of random piecey-ness to my quilt top while still being simple and fast to cut and piece. Only two size pieces will be used: 3 x 2 inches and 10 x 2 inches.

Cutting a 3 x 2 inch piece (they're actually 3.5 x 2.5 so there can be a 1/4-inch seam allowance)

Here is all the fabric for the top of my quilt

This is 720 3.5" x 2.5" pieces, 144 10.5" x 2.5" strips, and 270 2.5" x 2.5" squares (for a pieced inner-border). It will yield 72 10 x 10 inch squares. So far so good! I'm in the middle of sewing together the 3 x 2 inch pieces. My wonderful housemate has a sewing machine that she neglects terribly and so is happy to let me use it.

For an idea of what this quilt will look like finished, check out this artist's Etsy listing for her own jelly roll quilt. Notice the lines of shorter pieces separated by longer strips. My quilt will be much larger than this one.

Excursions in Car Repair: Day 2

I successfully replaced my car window! I'm not going to pretend it was easy, but from start to finish the whole thing only took an hour. Take heart everyone! If your windows aren't automatic, you too can replace them if they break.

Step 1: Remove the door panel. Most of the panel just snaps off around the edges. There is one screw to be removed which holds the interior door handle in place. The door handle is also attached to a metal bar that actually controls the latch mechanism, so it has to be gently eased off. The window roller is the most difficult thing to remove. It fits over a smaller knob and is secured a piece of metal sort of like a paper clip. (Listen to that! I don't know ANY of the real terms for these things! It all sounds so vague and non-descript.) The window knob is just jimmied off with a flathead screwdriver by pushing on the "paper clip" until it releases.

Detached Door Panel

Step 1a: Remove all glass shards from the door frame. There were still a lot of glass fragments along the frame creases where the window had been and in the tracks the housing runs along. The bottom well of the door interior is also full of glass shards, but I had to leave those, because I didn't have a shop vac.

Step Two: Expose and remove door innards to reach window housing. The interior of the door is sealed with a sheet of plastic and this black, gummy stuff. This part is just pulled off. On the bottom right of the door, there's a polygonal piece of metal (which appears to serve to direct function) which has to be detached. Once this is done, you can see the track and housing for the window.

Door Innards

Here are two close-ups of the window housing itself. The screws fit into two holes at the bottom of the window glass. On the right side of picture (a) you can see the track that the housing moves on as the window is raised and lowered. In picture (b) you can see the cable that the rolling mechanism is actually winding when the window is raised. The screw in picture (a) was very tightly attached, and I ended up needing pliers to loosen it first. My little Phillips head was not offering enough torque.

Window Housing (a)

Window Housing (b)

Step 3: Clean the new window glass. My piece of glass was filthy from its time spent in the salvage yard. I didn't think to take a picture of the glass before it went into the door, though.

Step 4: Insert glass into door. I started this step with the housing rolled all the way up, thinking it would be easiest to line the holes up this way. It turns out that the dimensions of the glass and window frame don't really allow this, so after about five minutes I realized it would be easier if the window was rolled all the way down. This allowed me to gently lower the glass into the door and settle it into the housing. The glass is just the perfect width, so it doesn't really take a lot of effort to get the bottom centered properly with the screws. The glass very naturally wanted to slide into the side tracks, and a few gentle-but-firm pushes lined the screw-holes up perfectly. Putting one screw in helped, too. At the bottom of the picture (d) below, you can see where the window has been fitted into the housing.

Newly Installed Glass (c)

Newly Installed Glass (d)

Step 5: Reattach door panel. This was just a matter of doing everything in reverse. The plastic covering of the innards stuck right back onto the gummy black stuff, and I think I reattached the window roller properly. It hasn't fallen off yet! There were a couple of non-essential pieces I left off, and they're still waiting in my cup holder. Since I will have to remove the door panel again when I finally vacuum out all the glass inside, I will put those piece back on then. Here's the finished work, good as new:

Finished Door with Window and Panel

And there you have it! Do not be intimidated. All you need to affect this repair for yourself are Phillips and flathead screwdrivers, maybe some pliers, and a little bit of moxie. I am proud that it cost me less than $20 ($17.42 for the glass plus $2.00 for admission to the salvage yard) and an hour of my time to get this done. Not only is it inexpensive, but it was very enlightening and empowering. Not very messy, either! The other victims of the burglar paid $150 or more for this repair, but here I am, out less than 20 bucks plus with the added knowledge of how a car window works. I am delighted.

Peace, folks!

Excursions in Car Repair: Day 1

Last Sunday night, some stoned-ass punk broke into my car. This person also broke into three other cars in my apartment complex, breaking one window in each car and basically taking whatever he could reach with one hand through shattered glass. From me, he took the GPS out of the glove compartment. From one lady, he took her Bible, which was easily confused with a purse in its nice carrying case. From another car, he took a GPS and left a perfectly nice, expensive laptop sitting on the back seat. We're all very lucky that this guy was clearly clueless, and probably inebriated.

At any rate, I was left without a front passenger window. Monday afternoon when I went to my car, I found a gaping hole in the glass and shards all over the front seats and floor. Fortunately, this is the only damage to the car. A quick phone consultation to my dad and I knew what I had to do: get a new piece of glass and put it in the door. Finances being what they are now, this would have to be done myself, but as it's a wholly mechanical repair, I can manage it. However, the nice weekend we just had was followed by a straight week of rain, and I didn't have a day pleasant enough to do open-air auto repair until today.

Today, I went out to the Pick-N-Pull in Rocklin to find a front passenger window for a 2000 Ford Escort sedan. This is a wholly new experience for me. First of all, they charge admission ($2), like at a county fair. They told me the car I wanted was on their lot, but made no guarantees that the part I wanted was there. They gave me a list of the cars currently on the lot that have a part that would fit mine and sent me on my way. Then I had to go wandering around the Ford section looking for an Escort. The first one I saw had the roof completely caved in, so no windows. A few rows along toward the back, I saw a nice red Escort, a 1999, which was perfect, and it had an intact front passenger window.

Did I mention that you're supposed to bring your own tools to a Pick-N-Pull? I didn't figure this out until I was there, a half hour from home, and had paid admission. So I get the door of the car open and I set about trying to pry the door panel off so I can reach the window attachments. I might have succeeded if I hadn't tried to be gentle about it. Most of the work was already done before I got there, but I wouldn't have gotten my part today except for a pair of nice men who walked by looking for a T-bird (or maybe a Mustang?). The up-down knob had to be removed and a few more screws had to be taken out. If I had just brought flathead and Phillips screwdrivers, I would have been fine. Oh well, one of them was kind enough to disassemble the door panel for me so we could see the window.

The glass slides up and down tracks on either side. It is held in place in a housing at the bottom with two more screws. The trickiest part of the repair was getting the door panel itself off, actually. A few more minor pieces obscured the view of the glass, and these were removed with simple unscrewing as well. After that, the window just slid right out the top. It's not even that heavy. So, after leaving the door panel and screws sitting inside the car (no need to reassemble, though I could have used the practice), I marched my new window up to the payment trailer. They were having a half-price sale, so it came to $17.42 (Looks like I picked the right week to have my car burglarized!).

Tomorrow: Day 2 - Putting a new window in my car. Pearl's gonna be so pretty!