A quilt for a friends’ wife

After the intense drought, over most parts of our country, we still did not get the rain we are used to for this time of the year but we are grateful for what we get anyway.  This little rain turned hubby’s garden (I don’t garden, so I can’t take any credit) into a sight for sore eyes.

I know seeing quilts done by men is not that strange anymore but it still leaves me in awe.  Not sure whether I’d like my hubby to take up the hobby, I am sure we’d constantly fight about the fabric, machine and tools but I do admire men who take the leap and do the not so familiar to them.

This male quilter (married to a quilter too) made this quilt for a friends’ wife.  I hope the friend realises the value and time that went into this.

He requested a larger scale all over motif, something I did on another quilt made by his wife and with all the colours, no use trying to do custom quilting as it would simply get lost in translation.

This quilt, however, had a catch or 2.  He wanted fleece as a backing, not a problem as I’ve worked with fleece backings before, no batting and then what turned out to be the biggest obstacle was that the size of the fleece was exactly the same as the quilt.

His wife added poly-cotton strips to the 4 sides to give the clamps on the long-arm machine a place to grip.  This did NOT work. I don’t think one can accurately measure fleece to add strips to it and after loading it, the sides slacked so much it seems these strips were added with the slap and stitch method and not measured at all.  While the fleece backing was taught on the frame the sides were a big mess.

Then as I attached the clamps the stitching between the fleece and side fabric came apart on some places, meaning no tension on the fleece backing at all.

Once I started quilting, wanted to advance where I have to unclip the clamps one can clearly see how the fleece shrunk back pulling the top fabric to cause bubbles and the seam between the fleece and strip caused my stitching line to be horrendous.  The stitching line can be hidden in the binding but the bubbles definitely not.

The more I advanced I also noticed that the fleece turned out not to be quite as square as it might have been advertised as I simply had less fleece showing up at the sides.  Attempts to pull or stretch this a little, lead to undoing the seams of the strips sewn onto it even further or even worse make the top form more bubbles as the fleece relaxed.  At one stage while trying to stitch a quarter-inch inside the side of the top, I luckily checked and noticed that apart from the side strips having come apart (again) I’ve been sewing through nothing and the backing was not caught at all.  I had to sew in much deeper just to keep the layers together.  It looks awful.

There was just no way I planned to unpick this lot and luckily I warned the quilter that I cannot guarantee I’d stay on the fleece but little did I know what a big problem the side strips would turn out to be.  I am really not sure how the quilter is going to fix this apart from cutting at least 1 inch off both sides but I’ll leave it up to him.

When done, I had to admit that the fleece backing at least looked fine.

This is my 50^th customer quilt for the year but sadly what I thought would be a celebration turned into utter frustration but so I learn.  Never again on fleece with seams of any kind.