Blankets and quilts
Big but approachable
In the previous article in this series, I used blankets and bedspreads as examples. Even though they are often bought, and often incredibly cheap to buy as well, they are still often made by hand, at home.
Blankets and quilts are often big project. They take a long time to make, and their size sometimes makes them hard to plan. If you want a single-colour item, it can be expensive to buy all of the materials at once, and it can be dead boring to make something so large from a single colour. On the other hand, blankets and quilts are the only things some people ever make. There are entire lines of yarn for knitting and crochet which are designed especially for the serial blanket-maker, and patterns as well. Same for quilting. As I write this, quilting is so popular some sewists are having trouble finding fabric in their area that isn’t quilting cotton.
If you need a blanket or quilt straight away, of course buying it is always an option. If you have time, lack money, or both, making is something to consider seriously. You may well already have most of the materials you need, in the form of clothing or other fabric you no longer want.
Blankets, bedspreads, and quilts are all items which have been made from leftovers materials from other projects, or worn-out items. Sometimes the are made in one large piece, but often they are made from smaller pieces which are eventually joined together to make the final item.
This means a few things for someone making one of these items for themselves. You don’t need to buy all of the materials at once. You can save as you come across them, or even get started on the item and then set it aside until you have more materials to continue with. This can have an upstream effect if you’re using used clothing. Now that your clothing will have a second life as part of a new object, it makes more sense to buy better-quality fabric if you can find it for a good price.
In the nineteenth century, it was common in western Europe and North America to make bedspreads by making one small motif at a time, then piece them together. Sometimes the motif was attached to the larger work as it was formed, other times all the smaller pieces were assembled in as a final step. Using a piecing method like this makes the work more portable, because you don’t need to haul around the almost-finished work with you. You can relax and just focus on constructing one motif at a time, and eventually you’ll have something big enough to cover a bed.
People who don’t make things often love to loudly proclaim, “you must be so patient! I would never have the patience to do that.” This often makes me wonder how they can stand to eat a meal one bite at a time.
The trick is you don’t need patience, but you do need to change your focus. Knitting or crocheting a single stitch, or sewing a single motif, can take less than a second or as long as a few minutes, but that’s a short enough amount of time that you get the satisfaction of completing something. A motif takes a bit more time, but is still pretty small. Typically, if the person has enough free time, they can finish at least one motif per day, maybe several. From that perspective, needing a couple of hundred motifs for a single finished work doesn’t seem so bad, and if you just finish one motif at a time and then concentrate on single motifs, you can build up a very large collection without really realizing. For the quilt I’m working on now, I wound up making extras by accident when I miscounted. If I’d miscounted in the other direction and wound up short, I had spare fabric I could work with. Precision is necessary for a lot of home-made items, but the precision doesn’t hold the terror a lot of non-makers ascribe to it.
There are other consequences besides adjusting one’s mindset to making something large enough to cover a bed or the back of a couch. If you’re working from leftover or re-purposing fabric, you’re cutting down on the amount of items you are sending to landfills. It’s important to keep in mind that even when you donate used clothing to charity, it often winds up in landfill anyhow, because it’s more worn out than you thought, or it simply doesn’t sell at the thrift shops. Recycling is all well and good, but reuse is even better than recycling. Reducing, of course, is even better still, but if you already have the resources sitting at home, you may as well reuse them into something you actually need.
Sometimes, when people are faced with the idea of creating blankets, bedspreads, or quilts themselves, they say things like, “I’m not really into the Victorian aesthetic. I prefer a modern, minimal look.” Hey, me too! That’s why I love looking at textiles that were made with those aesthetics in mind.
There are some wonderful examples of Bauhaus textiles which use simple stripes and squares to build up beautiful geometric patterns. Or, there’s the Gee’s Bend quilters I mentioned in a previous article. Just because something was made by hand with reuse in mind doesn’t mean it has to look folksy. Having said that, take a look at the nineteenth century or earlier work anyhow. Sometimes it’s more modern-looking than it may first appear, and just needs different colours and context to suit a contemporary decor.
Blankets, quilts, and bedspreads give you a chance to personalize and coordinate while having fun and spending very little. It can definitely be more interesting than just searching for the least awful option and ordering it online.
Would you (or have you) made your own blanket or quilt? Let us know in the comments!
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