I grew up with a grandma who quilted, but she’d never been interested in passing along the hobby, so when she finally kicked it I was the grandkid who got all her materials, ‘cause I was the only one who knew how to use a sewing machine. Then, in 2015, a friend had a baby and I figured I’d make her a quilt, ‘cause how hard could it be?
oh
my
god
Luckily I am the stubbornest human alive, ‘cause I never woulda finished otherwise. I didn’t know what I was doing, didn’t know the terms to look up how to do anything, I musta reinvented the wheel like eight times and it took ten months, BUT I DID IT.
Figured I’d suffered enough and would never do it again and now I’m on quilt #9 smdh
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I’m hyperventilating.
Holy shit. Holy SHIT.
This is INCREDIBLE.
Oh my god.
I’ve gotta go lay down holy shit look at this how do we just walk by other human beings every day and live our separate lives when there’s a person sitting next to you on the train or in line for coffee who goes home and makes things like this what even IS being human holy shit.
GOOD FUCKING JOB.
Oh heck I did not expect the notes to blow up on this, UM
Okay so on a purely technical level, this is not that difficult, you just gotta come at it a little sideways.
The background of this sucker is just rows of 1.5″-wide fabric strips. I can’t remember the exact pattern, but I wanna say it was something like one row 6″ strips, one row 4.5″ strips, one row alternating? I don’t remember exactly, it was a while ago. That’s not difficult, you just lay it out and sew it all together one row at a time. It’s not hard, just tedious.
The fish are a lil different. I can’t draw, there is a disconnect somewhere and my hands are stupid, so I figured out probably fifteen years ago that tracing was the way to go. For this, I legit just yanked several photos of fancy-looking goldfish off the internet and traced over ‘em in Photoshop.
Once I had enough, I printed my outlines, laid ‘em out on the background to create the idea of movement, and then traced the outlines out on fabric and pinned the hell out of ‘em.
This woulda been WAY easier with Heat ‘N Bond, but I didn’t know that was a thing at the time. From there I just used just about every fancy stitch on my inherited sewing machine to make the fish STAY WHERE I PUT THEM, and also look good.
I have since learned this is called “raw edge applique” but whatever. It’s fun, it’s neat, you can do it with a bunch of stuff and impress the hell outta people. More recently, it’s how I’ve gone from this:
to this:
(this was another project I SUFFERED over unnecessarily, because I’m the dip that decided to quilt the waves, like a moron)
god that sucked but it looked SO COOL when I was done!
I’m very sorry to tell you that if you thought we would be less impressed with you after this update you were very mistaken. I’ll say again:
Holy. Shit.
I have so much respect for people who go to make something for the first time and are like….. “I’m gonna do a super advanced one.”
