Quilting, version 2

Every year at Wellesley, I was one of the small group of students who stayed on campus over the winter break, having the chore/pleasure of cooking my own food in the dorm basement kitchens and finding ways to keep from being bored over a month of cold and snowy days. At the time of my studenthood, there were several non-credit “fun” courses offered as well, usually meeting once a week and covering topics from Shakespeare to wine tasting to book binding. Unfortunately for current students, there are no more Wintersession courses on campus (but if you have a few thousand bucks sitting around and proficiency in one or more of a handful of popular foreign languages, you could spend the month abroad–they had this when I was there too, but I was severely lacking in the former requirement). So I’m glad I was able to participate in these classes, especially the one I took in 2002.

Taught by an admin in the Religion Department, “The Gentle Art of Quilting” was designed to teach all the skills needed to make a quilt over the course of four sessions. Above is the mini-quilt I made, proving that I have what it takes to make the real thing, minus the time/commitment. Since that very enjoyable course, I have made exactly zero full-sized quilts, having focused my sewing energy on skirts, bags, and other small, more manageable pieces.

And yet I’ve never lost the desire to really get into quilting, so when a fellow alum put up a post on Facebook looking for other Wellesley quilters to take part in a quilt-a-long, I quickly responded. She offered to send me some fabric scraps to get started, and yesterday I received this:

Around a kilo of novelty fabric bits, just begging to be cut into small finicky pieces and sewn together. A lot of them are animal-themed, and I plan to mix them with several of the animal fabrics I already own, in a disappearing nine-patch pattern. I have faith that this quilt will happen because a) I now own a sewing machine (hand-piecing that mini-quilt was SLOW), and b) I have the added motivation of quilting at the same time as someone else, even if she is on the other side of the continent. In true Wellesley fashion, we’ve discussed making a bigger project out of this, eventually involving multiple alums–we’ll see where that goes. For now, time to dust off the rotary cutter and get started.