Old-Fashioned Fruitcake
Once upon a time there was a woman called Anna Margaretta Brereton, and she had ten children.
One by one, five of her children died. After the loss of her fifth child, she withdrew to her chamber and began to sew. She cut, she basted, she pieced, she appliquéd, she embroidered.
She hand-sewed not only a full, sweeping bedspread for a four-poster bed, but all the drapes and hangings to go with it.
Remember I promised I’d tell you the tale of how the Rose Quilt gargoyle came to be? Well, here it is. Pop some corn, brew a cuppa, and settle down.
Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.
Many years ago, when when the world was young and so was I, before wrinkles began to appear upon my face (i.e. about twelve or thirteen years ago), I went to a charity quiz day. It was a great deal of fun. I wasn’t on the winning team, but I did win the prize for Youngest Person Present; and I won some LPs in the auction of donated items which formed part of the day’s entertainment.
Where does the quilt come into it, I hear you ask? Bear with…
You see, it occurred to me, idealistic young creature that I was, that I could make something to donate to the auction at the next year’s charity quiz. But what?
It was then that the Murky Fog of Great Foolishness settled about my head. I saw in a book a paint-by-numbers image of a spray of roses, intended to be applied to plates for an elegant dinner set.
Gosh, thought I, my mental processes already under the dizzying effect of aforementioned Murky Fog. Wouldn’t this look good if it was an appliqué quilt – and a metre and a half across? (That’s about five feet, for the imperialists.)
Sadly, being a student at a university possessed of large copying machines, it was all too easy to produce an enlarged paper version of my mad vision, and then…
And then everything slowed down.
There are about two hundred pieces to this thing, and each one needed to be cut in paper, clearly numbered, laid out (the other way up) on the right colour of cloth (two packs of fat quarters), cut, and tacked. And then I could start on the piecing.
By mid 2008, it looked like this:
Those of you who are good at estimating may have noticed that there are fewer than two hundred pieces shown. That is because only the background parts of each leaf are shown. (You didn’t think I would leave it this simple, did you?)
Those of you who are good at observing may have noticed that these pieces are not actually sewn together, just laid out on newsprint, and that some of the pieces still have tacking stitches.
Fast-forward a few years, to about 2010, and… I’m an unemployed graduate, still sewing little patches on to leaves.
Fast-forward… oh, say, another five years, and I’m married, living in another city, and trying to downsize. I’m living in a house with a spare room, and so I lay the whole thing out and think about chucking it.
But I don’t. I keep going. I sew the elements together into one enormous unwieldy motif (for those of you who are thinking of doing this: don’t), and I pad it. And then I lay out the backing and I pin and re-pin and eventually decide that it’s going to look munted anyway and so I might as well just get it done.
So I sew on the bud and the leaves around it… and then I shovel it all back into the bag for another year or two. Until at last I learned prudence and now it’s coming along. In fact, I was feeling downright chirpy about it until I realized that I have got almost all the way through the step that I started a couple or three years ago. Woo…
Once that’s done, I only need to mark the quilting patterns, make the sandwich (front, batting, back), tack the sandwich together, quilt it, bind the edges, and then get rid of the plaguey thing.
If you’re in the market for a munted circular quilt of extremely variable workmanship, let me know. I’ll try to have it finished before old age overtakes me completely.
So there you have it, my friends. Learn from my mistakes: put the crazy idea down and step away from the enlarging photocopier.
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You win some and you lose some. Sometimes they’re the same one. Which is to say, when I put the sides-to-middled, patched and darned sheets on the actual bed, I saw another area that probably needs patching (which of course didn’t show up when I was actually looking for it).
The sheets are holding up, however, and to my surprise the seam isn’t noticeable unless you go feeling for it. So I’m going to call that a win, and add another patch at my own convenience.
As for progress on the other projects:
Curtains – none.
Rose Quilt – one evening (about two hours) of appliquéing the motif onto the background.
Slow progress, but still progress!
How are yours going?