Mid winter feels like the perfect time to make a quilted jacket.
I used a linen/cotton blend for the outer fabric and since I couldn’t wait for cotton batting to arrive, sweatshirt material acted as the insulation layer.
With all the layers lined up and sandwiched together, I pined the them together in many places with safety pins.
I marked one line going all the way up and down, one line going all the way across to act as a starting stitching guide. I sewed along the up and down line first, then picked an approximate equal distance from the first line of stitching to sew all the other lines.
Once all the pieces were quilted, I trimmed up the edges and sergered all the way around before sewing them together into a jacket.
I recently wrote an article on The Thread in my series of guest blog posts about winter being a wonderful impetus for pursuing your creative ideas.
Here is an excerpt:
“Spring is an invitation to plant gardens and tap maple trees for their sweet sap, summer is an invitation to collect hickory husks for dyeing linen (and picking mulberries to eat), fall is an invitation to chop down trees for firewood, and unlike the others, the dreaded winter is a special invitation for creativity.
Recently I read something my sister, Anna, wrote describing the importance of being truthful in creative nonfiction writing. She had a very interesting insight. She said that creativity doesn’t thrive in the absence of boundaries, rather, creativity flourishes within the constraints of boundaries. Limits are actually the best fuel for creation.”
