Final piece - Day one

Today I started making my end-of-second-year final piece. For this module we have to make either a single piece, or a small collection. I have decided to make one piece. It is a whole cloth white quilt made up of 10,800 1cm squares, which are then over stitched, removed or ironed to create a minimalist wall hanging.

Yep you read that right. White. Totally white. Not a single scrap of colour. For those of you who know me in real life, you will understand what a challenge this might be for clumsy old me. I have had to be very strict with myself there is to be no tea, no jam covered bagels, no easter eggs (I've already learnt that lesson!), and certainly no dirty hands anywhere near this piece until it is finished. I am going to try and blog each day showing my progress to give you an idea of how I am pulling this thing together. I did have a grand time lapse video plan creating a little video showing how it was made, but I don't have the equipment and honestly it was just another way of not getting on with making this quilt.

First there was measuring, cutting, iron cleaning (yes, I cleaned the iron, did I mention how white this is?) and ironing. Lots of ironing:

Then on to basting. Basting is where you sew your quilt top, back and wadding together very big long tacking stitches all over to hold it in place when you go on to quilt it. This is definitely the most boring part of the whole process. It takes forever, you end up with bruised or bleeding fingers, but it is a very important thing to do. So first I picked my basting accompaniment:

Then I taped my quilt back down,

Smoothed out my wadding - spending almost 10 mins picking off every single stray thread or bit of fluff which would later ruin the look of this minimal piece.

Added the top, and smoothed and smoothed the fabric till it was completely flat

Then the stitching started, you start from the centre and work outwards in a union jack style, before adding lots of extra vertical and horizontal lines. Several hours later I have a fully basted quilt.

And then onto the machine. I calculated there are going to be about 300m of straight lines sewn in this first stage.  I've done about 5% and I'm already tired!