Squares to quilts

You know how this goes. First we find a raw material, sometimes already processed in some way. Then we refine that material according to our own purposes. Then we reassemble that material in a variety of ways, again according to our own purposes. Some materials conform to our wills and our intention better than others.

Fabric likes being floppy. Although I hate using pins to establish order in a quilt as I work, I must admit that pins make the work come out much more finely and beautifully. The squares line up at their corners, for one. Little by little, a quilt emerges. This one is "throw" sized, meaning about 60×70" in finished size. I'm guessing. This works out to be about 11 6" squares long by 8 squares wide. The going price for such quilts on Etsy seems to be between $350 and $400. That makes them more than double the value of the infant quilts I've been making… but they're also shaping up to be roughly double the work. So I guess it evens out.

In the past I've seen all of the rows together, and then sewn the columns. But I need my floor back, for another project I'm working on. So I did the layout of the squares last night in the dark, adjusted them, and then adjusted that layout again this morning. This time I'm sewing he rows together, and sewing each row to the one next to it, as I go. That way I can be assured that the order remains stable. Then there's batting and backing to attach. There's quilting to be done, and an edge binding to attach. Photography and a written description of the making of the quilt, too — which will include links to this write up, I suspect. And yet I do like how, almost silently, a quilt emerges from a tumbled pile of squares, ordo ex chao.

It's almost as if I'd planned to make something beautiful from the beginning. But that would be ridiculous and silly, wouldn't it?

Why, it's almost s ridiculous as saying that I didn't use mathematics in the process of making this quilt top.

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