Some of you may remember my mad attempts to finish making a quilt for our bedroom during my overly ambitious days of late pregnancy. Perhaps some of you even wondered if I managed to get it done on time, although probably not. I'm guessing you have plenty of other things to think about.
Anyhow, the quilt did, indeed, get finished. But here's the thing: I'm not really a quilter, although I do occasionally play one on the internet. I pieced the entire thing myself, and was pretty pleased with how it came together, but I was also smart enough to know that my feelings of goodwill towards this project could be easily done away with by frustrating attempts to quilt and bind the whole thing while eight months pregnant and absolutely enormous. Plus, when it came right down to it, I just didn't really feel like doing it. So, I bundled up the quilt top, stuffed it into a box and sent it off to Alewives. They did the quilting and binding for me, and I had them add the batting and backing from materials in their shop. By the time I got the quilt top off to them, I was really, truly, ridiculously pregnant and I found the Alewives folks to be extraordinarily tolerant of my particular brand of third trimester crazy. Like when they called and asked how I wanted the quilting pattern to look and I said "Oh, I have no idea. Why don't you just think of something and do it? I'm sure it will be fine." Like I hadn't just spent months working on this quilt only to turn it over to strangers and tell them to do whatever they wanted with it. Ha! But they did a lovely job, so my faith turns out to have been very well placed.
The batting is washable wool, and so far I think it is amazing. I don't know that I will ever go back to cotton after experiencing how well wool works in a quilt. From the beginning, this quilt was designed to be used. I wanted to make a quilt that would be woven into daily life and that could be washed when it got kid dirt on it and that would feel warm and cozy during the long Vermont winter. And that is exactly what I made. So as far as feeling some latent guilt over the fact that I had a little help with the nuts and bolts of the operation? None. I'm sleeping very well at night under my new quilt, thank you very much.
