By the Numbers:
2 Quilting Techniques
~ 1 year of sewing
Boots are made for Hiking : A Gift for Mom
Front
Back
“Do you want this fabric?”…
“I'm tired of looking at it…” is how the conversation started with my mother one day. My mom and I both enjoy sewing and it’s something we frequently discuss, even though we have very different interests in the sewing realm. Mom likes to make stuff for the house - such as curtains and tablecloths - while I (obviously) prefer quilting. Occasionally we will both make bags or clothes.
How can you not get excited about this print? Soooooo fun! Good find Mom!
So when Mom called me to announced that she had a fabric she loved, but knew she wasn’t going to have time to make anything with it, she asked if I wanted it. Well, ya’ll probably know by now that my fabric ‘scavenging’ (?) ‘rescuing’ (?) tendencies perked up. Free fabric? Yes please! Que adding this super fun hiking boot pattern to my fabric stash!
Now, before Mom gave me the fabric, she had planned to make curtains..that’s a lot of fabric! We’re talking roughly 4-5 yards of fabric! What was I going to do with that much fabric?!
Make a quilt of course!
But not just any old quilt. This was a fabric my Mom loved and gave to me. So a quilt for Mom began!
Exploring New (to me) Techniques…
New (To Me) Technique Numero Uno:
1) Fussy cutting. I’d never really done any fussy cutting before, but with the boots being as fun and as big as they were, why not feature them? I quickly learned that I’m not the best at consistent measurement. My fussy cuts ranged from 11.5 to 12.5 inches, which meant that when I pieced my blocks, they were all different sizes! So what the heck was I supposed to do now that I’d screwed up my cutting yet again?! (Really -> I’m just terrible at this step…even after measuring twice!) I did what any quilter would do…I asked my quilty community for some help!
An example of a completed block, with fussy cut and a 30 degree angle cut
New (To Me) Technique Numero Dos:
2) 30 degree cuts. One of my quilting friends and mentors suggested that I ‘fix it’ by adding another color of fabric at a 30 degree angle to ‘hide’ the hiccup and then cut the squares down to the correct 12.5 inches I needed. Ummmmm…genius! After sampling a variety of different colors, I settled on black to help balance out the bold black lines on the boots. Also, by adding the 30 degree angle and cutting those blocks down, a ton of movement was immediately added to the quilt. Cue me singing “These boots are made for walking” by Nancy Sinatra for the next several months…and the name of the quilt. (Hey, I think I’m punny…)
Finally, New (To Me) Technique Numero Tres:
3) Inverted binding. So one thing I did here was to piece the denim scraps at an angle. When working with scraps, you don’t always have exactly the amount you need to make piecing straightforward and easy. So with the denim, I had to think creatively and out of the box: How could I make a backing big enough to accommodate this large quilt? I honestly have no idea how I came up with diagonal piecing as the solution, but it worked! Of course, by the time I had completed the top and backing, I had fallen in love with the zig-zag sides that diagonal piecing made. So I added that to the overall design and made a quilt with an irregular edge, which meant…wait for it…inverted binding!
Close up of inverted corner binding
This was something totally new to me. I’d never done it before on a quilt and wasn’t sure if it was even possible. Thankfully this YouTube video by Jo Baner exists. (There are several videos, but I liked hers the best. She does a great job explaining the technique!) It was interesting to see a total reverse on how you typically bind a quilt. But if you’re familiar with making garments, the technique is surprisingly similar to how you sew inward facing curves.
Challenge After Challenge…
Another challenge I encountered with this quilt was the black fabric itself! It was not a typical tightly woven quilting cotton and kept unraveling whenever it was cut. Actually, it too was a rescue fabric, so I’m not even 100% sure what type of fabric it was! About halfway through hand-stitching around the boots, I noticed that the black fabric had begun to separate from the other blocks! Well, f*ck…I had already stitched that top and backing halfway together, so I couldn’t simply re-stitch the quilt top. So I opted instead to zig-zag stitch through the combined top and bottom.
Pulling may hair out when the seams started pulling themselves out…
Of course, with the back of the quilt being pieced denim of all different colors and sizes, I knew that no one color of backing thread would match up. Plus, I wouldn’t be able to tell where I was on the back while also accounting for zig-zag stitching the front. So, I simply decided to use black thread all the way through and ‘ghost’ some of the stitching. I was already doing it for the hand stitching around the boots, so it seemed to make sense to do that for ‘fixing’ the top. It looks like that was intentional and it looks doooope!
