The Camping Quilt

Dude.

This quilt.

I can barely talk about it.

I decided to throw this thing together back in January.  Mitchell, my 12 year old, had a scout trip coming up and I was sick and tired of these poor boys going out in the crazy cold for overnighters.  ("Crazy cold" being a relative term... I do realize where we live.  But still.)  I had about a week to get it done, so I planned something quick and easy and bought all my supplies.

Measuring, cutting, and assembly all went along without a problem.  Then with 2 days left I got sick.  SOOOOO sick.  Not even aware that I was stopping all progress on the quilt, sick.  Mitch didn't even go on that campout because everyone in the house was getting it.

Then it sat around for weeks.  Then I got a head cold -- sick AGAIN.  And now that I'm over that, guess what?  Another campout was coming up.  Hmm.... I should really get that stupid thing done so he can have it.  I picked up where I left off:  quilting.

Problem #1:  Size.  In order to fold in half (hot-dog style) and go the full length of his sleeping bag with room for a growing boy, the total was about queen size.  It's massive.  That already makes it difficult to handle for free motion quilting on a standard size machine.

Problem #2:  Fleece.  For extra warmth that would still be light weight, I made one side entirely out of polar fleece.  This stuff has a lot of stretch to it, which is B A D for quilting.

Problem #3:  Trying to avoid anything too "girly" looking, I tried something new for the free motion design, huge random zig zags.  Maybe it was just too new and different for my brain to wrap itself around, or maybe it was just wrong in general, but when you combine this with the other "problems," I was not doing well.  The whole quilting process was crap.  It looked like crap, it was hard (nay, impossible) to do, and then came my next disasters.

One afternoon after working for 30+ minutes, I flipped it over and looked at the backside only to discover that the tension had gone awry and the underside of the stitches were all loosey goosey and..... horrible.  AAACK!  So I sat with the seam ripper and picked out about 2 miles of stitching for over an hour.  All that time and I was right back where I started.  I found the tension problem, fixed it, got all set to start again, sewed about 1 minute and promptly ran out of thread.  Of course!

I was able to dash away to the store during dinnertime, then came home and finished the exhausting job of quilting that thing for the rest of the night.  (The next day I did the binding and it was complete - about 90 minutes before he was to leave for the trip.  Just in the nick!)  I did NOT care about being perfect.  Some of the zig zags are more curvy than pointy.  There are plenty of "studders" and extra "jags" where I did not continue the pattern as it should be.  In the end, this is a blanket that will be dirty & stinky and used by a bunch of boys that do not care about aesthetics at all!  So, is it done?  Yes.  Is it my best work that I'm so proud to show off?  Ha ha ha, no.  And I will not be attempting something like this ever, ever, ever again.

This is the fleecy side.  The pic makes it look like raw batting, but I swear

it's just a light grey fleece.

A little closer up and you can see the crazy zig zags.

Now quick, burn the images from your memory.

And last, here's the adorable polka dot binding!

You can also see the very subtle herringbone look to the beige and blue fabrics.

Nice to be more interesting than a plain solid, but still masculine enough.

The good news:  Mitched loved it.  He even texted me during his trip last night and said 

"This blanket is the best!"

Awww, that's all this mommy needed.