A Finished Quilt and a Bucket List

Shirt Stripes, a string quilt started in 2016.

Here is a string quilt I started in 2016, using pieces of old shirts from thrift stores.  Back then, I had fun placing the fabrics to make the blocks, but later, I realized that there were a lot of problems, involving too many layers of fabric and too lofty of batting.  I had gotten it through my sewing machine to do the basic construction, but there was no way I was going to be able to free-motion quilt it, or even straight-stitch quilt with a walking foot.  For use here in Texas, I should have left batting out entirely, and I would have had a nice summer blanket.

I tried some hand quilting, but the quilt was just too thick and heavy to manipulate. Finally I gave up and tied it.

A close up of some hand quilting and the embroidery floss ties.

I had it spread out on a tall table, but it was still so awkward to move around.  I had trouble finding a needle that was large enough for 6-strand embroidery floss, but still sharp enough to pierce the tightly-woven shirt fabrics.  And after 2 to 3 hours of work, my neck and shoulders really felt the effort, so I worked on it over 5 days.  It was not easy to lug it around to photograph it, either! But it is finished, and my husband likes it.

Another view.

Tying did give me a lot of time to think.  I have been pretty good the last two years, at finishing up quilts I started many years ago, even if they reflected some unfortunate choices and/or lower skill levels.

I started these spools blocks sometime about 2010, put them together with sashing that was too bright in 2020. I over overlaid them with eyelet trim and finished the quilt in 2023.

Colorious. this quilt was started in 2016; I constructed the blocks in different ways which led to their being vastly different sizes. Finished in 2023.

I started putting random scraps together in 2020, and felt the result was too chaotic. I added a wide gray border with scrap parallelograms in 2023 to finish. This is one of my favorites.

I purchased this Snowball Flower top in 2017, and finished hand-quilting it this year.

So, while I still have plenty of works-in-progress, I was thinking about what I might like to do next. And then Andrea of ARHtistic License had a thought-provoking post about bucket lists today, which got me thinking in more general terms.

As I have gotten older, my bucket list has changed quite a bit — I no longer even think about going out to sky-dive, water-ski, or climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. For volunteer work, I no longer imagine myself building houses for Habitat for Humanity or filling sandbags for flood mitigation.  I do feel pressure to achieve things before things get difficult or time is up altogether!

Here are some of the things on my current list:

Volunteer, using my generation’s superpower, which is reading cursive. 🙂  There are a lot of digitized records online, that need to be transcribed so that search engines can find them, and the younger generations can read them! I really love perusing those little unknown bits of the past, and I can do it while sitting down in a climate-controlled area.

Genealogize (apparently that is actually a word)– we have so many bits and pieces from past generations, and people have done a lot of work on our family tree; I would like to get it as complete as possible.

Quilt — I would like to use up all the fabrics people have donated to me, to make more donation quilts.  I would like to try techniques from all the books I got in my last auction haul, and I would like to keep making small art quilts for the quarterly Endeavourers‘ challenges.

Learn — I would like to learn to use my camera properly.  And then I would love to use it when I —

Travel, especially to anyplace with an interesting market place, and crafts people I can learn from.  So many places still to go and so much to see!

Category : Quilting
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