A Quilt in a Day

Hi! Remember me?  June has been filled with travel and family events, so there has been little quiet time for composing a blog post--or even for quilting. But the grandchildren and their parents left this morning and all is quiet, except for the washing machine.

In between trips to the pond and reading sessions, four-year-old Gemma kept herself busy creating pictures to hang on a cupboard door, since the refrigerator was already full. One of them

--"It's a house with six windows and two chimneys and smoke coming out of the chimney and a door and a fence with a gate in front of the door"--caused me to say "That would make a great quilt."  I foolishly had forgotten what the obvious response a four year old would have to that comment. We had to begin immediately.


We went up to the "messy room," where my fabric is stored, along with a rocking chair and some other items moved out of the guest room for the length of their stay, and Gemma had a great time picking out the fabrics for each of the elements in the quilt.  I had to think fast about how we were going to put this together because she wanted to be involved in all the steps and her family was leaving the next morning.  Gemma had this vision of taking the quilt with her and hanging it in her room, and a disappointed four year old is not a pleasant experience.


I quickly traced freezer paper templates for the chimney and for the top of the house, ironed the edges down and after she positioned the chimneys we moved to the sewing machine and, with Gemma on my lap, began to sew. Next we worked on the windows: she positioned the template just where she wanted certain stripes to show and then cut them out while I worked on turning the edges of the door. She loved pressing the buttons to get the zigzag stitch length just right for sewing down the windows and helped turn the fabric around the curved tops, but we got to stitch faster on the straight bottoms and that was even more fun. We cut the ziggy zaggy fence and she chose the color thread for the top stitching.  She also decided it needed some grass on the bottom. I squared up the finished top, added batting and backing, zigzagged the edges while she walked in our woods with her father, and it was done before supper!

And if you are still with me--and Gemma--thanks for the company!