Melissa's Place

Mark’s Quilt

I made myself a quilt one weekend at my mom’s house. It was fast and easy and people seemed very impressed. I had to sew the backing onto the filling and the front by hand because I didn’t have a sewing machine then.

Then Mark bought me a sewing machine for Christmas and his mother bought me some beautiful quilting books. And Mark started asking, “Where’s MY quilt?”

So I started to make him a quilt. Carolyn came with me to Fabricland. It took over an hour to pick fabric. He’s very trendy and doesn’t like anything too girly or with flowers or with paisley swirls that might be construed as flowers. Even things I’d consider “masculine” like turquoise and blue and brown stripes he objects to. Apparently turquoise is never masculine. So I decided to go black and white, which is a bit boring. But I picked a black fabric that had musical notes on it. Mark collects records. It seemed good.

Then I went home and cut and ironed and pinned and sewed. Yes, you read that right. Instead of going straight from cutting to sewing, I actually ironed and pinned. I decided to move up the hierarchy of sewing mastery. I decided that this quilt was going to be great. I had sewed half of the patchwork together before I realized that I should have pre-washed the fabric. I consoled myself that cotton shrinks but if the whole quilt was cotton, everything should shrink at the same rate.

It took a few months, but I finally finished the front of the quilt. And then on Saturday night, I really kicked it into high gear. I went to Walmart and a pleasantly round and friendly lady who worked in the fabric section and who was obviously a seasoned quilter spent nearly 45 minutes teaching me some basics about quilting. She took twenty minutes and carefully explained how to make beautifully bound edges on my quilt and how to create lovely folded corners. Then before choosing the batting to go inside the “quilt sandwich”, I explained very carefully how Mark is always hot. How his internal thermometer, much like my own, registers very high. How even in the winter with the windows open wide, the two of us together create some strange type of human thermal combustion reaction that is probably visible from space. I explained that the quilt batting had to be VERY cool. “The coolest possible filler you have,” I insisted. Well, she pointed me to some very fluffy polyester stuff and assured me that cotton would be hot, so this fluffy stuff would be very cool.

Then I selected a fabric for the back of the quilt. I was odd black and white shapes and it made me kind of dizzy to look at, so I thought Mark would like it.

I took it home and set it next to the quilt and hated it.

But the next day, I sewed it on anyway. And then I bound the edges. I did the corners exactly as the lady had explained. It didn’t seem logical to me (it even occurred to me that I ought to look in one of the beautiful books Maggie had given me for a second opinion, but I was too lazy). Then I went to flip the blanket over to sew the other side of the binding and CRAPOLA, I’d been right. The corners were F@#$!@#ed! Absolutely ridiculously scrunched up. Irreparable? Well, I tried to cut them free and then realized I had loose frayable edges now. I cut a new piece of binding and attempted to sew corners on top of my corners. But I didn’t commit to one type of stitch. I tried to do normal stitching by hand, but it looked atrocious. So I tried to switch to invisible stitching, but in truth, I don’t know how to do invisible stitching so I was afraid it would just come right off if Mark sneezed too vigorously, so I took a crack at using the sewing machine on the corners. By this time I had about eighteen layers of fabric all bundled into those stupid goddam corners, but my sweet little machine took it like a man.

Mark came home and was delighted, absolutely DELIGHTED, with the quilt. He LOVED the dizzying fabric on the back and he didn’t care at all about the corners. I believe he might have even said they were “not bad”. And as a treat, so he could sleep with the quilt immediately that night, we threw the thing in the washer and dryer.

Now keep in mind that when I made the quilt, I’d wanted it to be larger than the one I’d made for myself. So I added more squares. But I forgot to count the half inch of fabric I lost at every seam. And I certainly didn’t bank on the kind of shrinkage that that poor blanket suffered in the dryer. It came out looking just a little bit shriveled and when poor Mark lay it over him, his feet stuck out.

I was trying to keep optimistic about the whole thing. I’d just spent a good 10 hours of my Sunday sewing a blanket with shitty corners and that had shrunk about a half a metre. “Your feet get too hot anyway,” I said to him.

He got the blanket tucked under his ankles and wrapped around him.
We laid in bed, in the dark, for a while in silence.

At least thirty minutes went by. Finally Mark leaned over and whispered tentatively, “I’m a bit cold.”