Tool Quilt - Completed

Miters and routers and drivers and nailers,

Hammers and saws and drill presses with lasers,

Silver steel hardware like hinges and springs,

These are a few of my favorite things.

I sewed the last stitch on the binding of the tool quilt this afternoon. It was made from a pre-printed center panel with borders and corner blocks sequentially added.

The challenge in this project was not in the color selection. Borders were from the coordinating prints within the same fabric line. The trick was to create an end quilt that was square since the center panel was not printed on the grain. Do you follow the print and wind up with a parallelogram that gets worse and worse with each border? Or do you the square it up and lop off some of the edges of the featured ruler or saw blade or plank?  I compromised, lopping off on a few of the borders where the  pattern would not be so revealing that I had done so.

The real craft in this quilt lies with the talented lady in Oklahoma who free-motion quilted it for me. Mary Ann patiently followed every thread of each bolt, spiraled around each circular saw blade, outlined each letter of the poem, squiggled through every hinge, and detailed every tool, be it hammer or drill or handsaw.  I've shown some of her work on this quilt in the following photos. Click here to see some of her other gorgeous work. 

 

The finished quilt is 63" tall x 44" wide. Maybe it will be a wall hanging, but we are out of wall space.  It could actually be put on a toddler size bed for a little boy. (Or a little girl, too – how sexist of me!)  I plan to wash it several times and see if it softens. I even signed and dated it today, even though I view putting on a label as a pesky detail.  The lettering stitch on my machine always seems to distort when I use it on the grosgrain ribbon for the label.  I wanted to be 100% finished today so here is my hand stitched alternative since I did not want to fight the machine version. The backing fabric is nuts and bolts! What else?