Category: Sewing

After two years of only going to 100% necessary inside places, I cracked and took an in-person workshop. There were a lot of bare faces, but us masked folk all gravitated to the same table near the open the door. I didn’t realize how much I missed making stuff with other people until the six hours had whizzed by and I felt super energized. Anyway, I’m really hoping we’re all healthy after spending so much time breathing in a room together.

The end product of marbling isn’t really my jam but it’s a fucking fun process. Wildcraft provided a beautiful little booklet with instructions for doing this at home.

Each participant was given a cut of pre-treated cotton fabric, one cotton bandana, one large piece of silk, and an individual marbling tub. Each table also had a larger basin to share and everyone rotated through doing one large sample in the big tub pictured up above. I had so much fun playing I only took three photos during the workshop so here’s a short video of what the process looks like.

Marbling really forces you to let go – you don’t really know how the paints are going to interact with each other, or which colors are going to actually show up on the fabric. Most of the colors I’m drawn to weren’t very vibrant once transferred to fabric.

Knowing I was going to have a lot of small cotton samples, I tried to stick with the same colors so they could be used in a mini quilt project, which I started sewing immediately at home.

I decided to cut up this blue piece because the fabric wasn’t great quality, I didn’t think I’d ever use it as bandana (its edges were finished), and I needed something to bind the wall hanging with. All of my other scraps didn’t quite work with the marbled fabric.

I just pieced the samples together and did a simple stitch in the ditch quilting pattern. The binding was machine sewn onto the front then folded and pressed to the back for hand-stitching.

I added little triangles to the corners so it can be hung on the wall and drilled some holes in scrap wood to mount.

My quilt is done and here’s the post about it! Click here for part 1.

Since the first post, I decided to add another 15 blocks because I wanted all four corners to have a 9 patch block. With 98 blocks and a square throw shape, that pattern wasn’t happening. Plus once the top was all sewn together it was a smidge smaller than I wanted.

After the top was complete, I combed through my remaining scrap pile and pulled out all of the black and white fabrics since those seemed to be the most plentiful. Some of these ikats are from some of my first ever garment projects, which is pretty fun.

I waffled for a bit on how to bind this quilt. I started with wanting to use the greenish Calvin Klein bed sheet I’d used for my Tamarack jacket. Then I though about using the backing to do mitered corners. There was a brief time where I thought about doing prairie points to use up even more scraps but ultimately I went back to that thrifted bed sheet/traditional binding method.

I cut up the last of the bed sheet into straight of grain strips because there weren’t any curves that’d require a bias cut. I have a lot leftover which I’ll use to bind some small scale quilted projects. I really love this color.

Once the quilt backing was assembled, I realized I didn’t have enough space to baste the layers in my sewing room and would have to do this step in the basement. It took a couple of weeks before I got around to washing the basement floor.

For the quilting pattern, I wanted something that would showcase the blocks. A simple stitched in the ditch grid pattern was done and I love it. I had to move my sewing machine to my cutting table to quilt since my machine is usually up against a wall. It took a couple of days to quilt. I went too hard the first night and my hips were very angry from a long stand up sewing session.

I then machine stitched on the binding to the right side. To finish, I hand-sewed it to the back, which I did at the beach. I’d say this is the best environment for finishing a multi-year quilt project!

And here she is, my fourth quilt (see the others here). I ran around with it on the beach to celebrate.

Here’s my classic “I just finished a quilt” pose.