Almost Midnight
Quilt No 20, April 2001
Update March 2020
Have you ever looked endlessly at one of your quilts and
thought “I love/hate you?” It’s the same feeling I get with do-nuts. While I was pleased with the sleepy winter
village and the big moon and sky of Almost Midnight, my eye kept snagging
on the poorly executed binding. I wanted
to replace the binding, but I had no matching fabric for this twenty-year-old
quilt. The drawer full of black fabric
was a bust. Time for Google.
This wasn’t the first time this quilt had me quizzing the
internet. I initially saw a version of this
quilt hanging in a quilt shop in a city some two hundred miles from where I lived. It was charming! I asked to buy the pattern. They would not sell it to me. What?! I had to
take their workshop to get the pattern. I explained that I lived impossibly far
away, expecting them to be sympathetic and accommodating. They were not. They even seemed a tad on the gleeful side,
saying I was unlikely to even
find the pattern elsewhere, since it was from a
long out-of-print book. I would have to
say that this is the only time in my twenty-year quilting odyssey that I have
encountered any quilt shop employee who was uncooperative. It’s been my usual experience that quilt shop
ladies are the absolute best, and I generally want to shower them with
chocolates and praise. They did
grudgingly tell me that the pattern was in an unattainable book called
Piece
on Earth, and that the quilt title was “Santa Cloths”. The original pattern had a Santa with a
sleigh full of presents where you see the moon on my quilt..
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I’m not sure if I turned to Google, since in the year 2000,
Google was still a speck in the eye of the internet, and cyberspace was largely
an unpopulated wild west. However, as a
librarian, I was pretty familiar with the blossoming digital world, and I persevered
until I located a used copy in a book store in California. This type of
purchase is boringly ordinary now, but it felt like a glorious victory at the
time. When the book arrived I ripped open the package in anticipation. There was the quilt…but the pull-out pattern
had been, well, pulled out. It was after
all, a used book. However, the vendor had failed to describe it
as an abused book.
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| Photo of "Santa Cloths" quilt in pattern book. |
The game was on. I scanned
in the photo
and enlarged it. I wanted a non-holiday themed quilt, so I
replaced the Santa with a moon. I used
up my various black and gold star fabrics that I’d been collecting, and
practiced my curved piecing on the moon and the sky. I hand quilted it with gold metallic thread
and capped it off with a less than stellar binding. In my defense, I’d have to say it looked okay
to me at the time…
Here in 2020 I once again found myself consulting
the internet on behalf of this quilt, trying to find some suitable black/gold star fabric for the binding - kind of tricky, since in the trendiness of
the textile world, this type of fabric is on the outs. However, once again, my search was
successful, thanks to F
abric.com.
O
ur guild holds Sew Days every month or two. Members can take
a workshop, or just bring their own project to work on. These are most definitely “don’t miss”
events, as we get to spend a whole day together immersed in quilting and
friendship. A pizza lunch is the
equivalent of the cherry on top. My plan was to take this quilt to the next Sew
Day. Replacing the binding would be the perfect one-day project. To prepare ahead, I removed the old binding and
repaired a wonky seam so that I could square the quilt up properly. I’d originally neglected
that as well. While I was at it, I added machine quilting
to the buildings and fleece roving for the chimney smoke. I pondered why two of the houses lacked
chimneys, but left it that way, since it was accurate to the original pattern photo. My guess it those two houses have
electric heating.
After I repaired the wonky seam, I got out my long straight
edge and tried to figure out where to cut.
This very quickly revealed that the inner border was waaaay off kilter,
being much narrower at the bottom than the top.
My chronic eye-balling of the ugly binding had kept this a secret from
me until now. Ugh. No way was this fix
going to be completed on a Sew Day!
Now what? There was only one option. The inner and the outer borders had to
go. I gritted my teeth and removed them.
I would have to replace them with new fabric.
But that would give me a three-layered quilt surrounded by an extended
area of only one layer of border fabric.
Batting and backing would need to be added in, and at the end of it,
there could be no raw seams on the back that would reveal the deed. Double ugh.
Fortunately, I had lots of extra fabric,
since Fabric.com had generously sent me several extra inches, as this piece was
the end of the bolt. Or maybe they just
knew…
I attached the inner and outer borders as you would normally
do on a quilt top. I then hand basted
batting strips to the wrong side of the new borders. After querying more than a few befuddled brain
cells, I figured out that putting facings on the quilt, rather than a traditional
binding, would address all the problems, including covering the newly added
batting on the back of the quilt. It
worked! In order to avoid rippling the quilt
interior, I added only one machine quilted line around the outer border, to
anchor all the layers.
The straightforward re-binding plan was just like one of
those situations where you purchase a new refrigerator. It’s two inches too tall for its allotted space. You then need new cabinets…oh they show the worn-out
floor…gee whiz the stove now looks dodgy…It starts out simple and very quickly
get complicated, expensive, and guilt-inducing. But in the end, the whole quilt got an much
needed update, and it has now been restored to the “love it” category.
