Saturday, November 12, 2011

Bad Quilts That Make Me Smile

Okay, so there aren't any bad quilts.  What can be bad about three layers of coziness put together by loving hands?  


There are badly made quilts and I seem to be an expert in making them.


I just looked over my past quilt postings and each one of them seems to have included words like 'mismatched corners', 'blunted points', 'discarded blocks that didn't fit' or some such confession of piecing disaster.  I have noticed that most of my backings have a wrinkle or three in them and sometimes the quilting looks like a dog's breakfast.


But in each and every case, the final results have made me smile.  Whether it is because I have no idea how it all got done, or the fabrics have disappeared, or the blocks are of many different sizes, or the borders were 'made' to fit or wrinkles were quilted to within an inch of their lives.  They have made happy.


My latest Bad Quilt began in 1998 and I just took it out of the dryer this morning after a marathon quilting session yesterday.  I originally posted about it here.  If you look at that posting you will see that I finished the top this March and it took about another eight months to get it quilted.


Here is how it now looks....


I decided that I could not quilt it in simple straight lines as there were so many mismatched corners.  In the end I did find a few straight lines to anchor it all and then I quilted circles at various points to hold it all together.  I like the way it looks and I had a lot of fun(?) seeing if I could make two circles the same size one right after the other.


I couldn't.


This quilt does make me smile because of all the missteps in getting it made but the best part is that my oldest UFO quilt is now done!!


And isn't that something to smile about?

1 comment:

Jenny Gabriel said...

Hi Alice,
Your quilts make me smile!
I have a ufo quilt from 2006. Maybe I'll finish it.....
Whenever, if-ever I do, you'll be among the 1st to know!