Quilting, the old fashioned way

Last night Miranda and I put a baby quilt on frames at her house. When the quilt was up on its frames, I said to her, “Now that was fast.” Then I remembered our two weeks of preparations. We had borrowed the stands from Moiya some months ago, we had shopped for the fabric last week, she had gone to buy the two by twos for the frames at Home Depot on another day, and we slipped over to Wal-mart on one of the trips to pick up crotchet cotton and needles.

But last night, Richard had gone to his garage to find bring in a box of assorted sizes of C-clamps, which seemed like the last of the equipment we needed. So what seemed to be a seamless hour when we knelt down on the floor to put the quilt on the frames had taken a lot of preparation. We laid the boards out and stapled the back fabric, the batting and printed material of the front to the frames.

We might have done two hours of quilting if we had been able to thread one of the needles. Not only did the needle threader break, but I couldn’t get the crotchet cotton through any of the needles in the assorted package we had purchased. I tried a few stitches with the largest needle in the package (sans thread) only to find that what was true in the past is still true now. When a person quilts, the distance between her thumb and her middle finger on which the thimble sits, cannot be so large that there is no room to manoeuvre the needle through the layers of fabric and batting.

That is when I remembered that my mother used to use a very short stubby needle, the eye of which was large enough for her to thread some crotchet cotton through. As well, Wyora did not prefer the ones called quilters but I do not remember what the package was called.

When I left her house, Miranda was Googling all of the quilting shops in Calgary, to see which was closest to us and what time they opened, so that we can get that precious right size of needle we need.