Almost Midnight

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..

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.

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 Fabric.com.

Our 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.