I grew up with a grandma who quilted, but sheâd never been interested in passing along the hobby, so when she finally kicked it I was the grandkid who got all her materials, âcause I was the only one who knew how to use a sewing machine. Then, in 2015, a friend had a baby and I figured Iâd make her a quilt, âcause how hard could it be?
oh
my
god
Luckily I am the stubbornest human alive, âcause I never woulda finished otherwise. I didnât know what I was doing, didnât 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 Iâd suffered enough and would never do it again and now Iâm on quilt #9 smdh
âââââââââ
Iâm hyperventilating.
Holy shit. Holy SHIT.
This is INCREDIBLE.
Oh my god.
Iâve 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 thereâs 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 1.5âł-wide fabric strips. I canât remember the exact pattern, but I wanna say it was something like one row 6âł strips, one row 4.5âł strips, one row alternating? I donât remember exactly, it was a while ago. Thatâs not difficult, you just lay it out and sew it all together one row at a time. Itâs not hard, just tedious.
The fish are a lil different. I canât 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 âem in Photoshop.
Once I had enough, I printed my outlines, laid âem out on the background to create the idea of movement, and then traced the outlines out on fabric and pinned the hell out of âem.
This woulda been WAY easier with Heat âN Bond, but I didnât 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 âraw edge appliqueâ but whatever. Itâs fun, itâs neat, you can do it with a bunch of stuff and impress the hell outta people. More recently, itâs how Iâve gone from this:
to this:
(this was another project I SUFFERED over unnecessarily, because Iâm the dip that decided to quilt the waves, like a moron)
god that sucked but it looked SO COOL when I was done!
Iâm very sorry to tell you that if you thought we would be less impressed with you after this update you were very mistaken. Iâll say again:
Holy. Shit.
