Quilting post

It took me three and a half weeks to finish my most recent quilt, and that’s with putting it aside for a week and a half. I’d post a photo but I want it to be a surprise for the person I made it for. Even though she bought the fabric, she doesn’t know how it’s put together. I can’t wait to ship it off and have her get it. Exciting!

The next quilt is going to be for my mother-in-law for Christmas. I’m making a jelly roll quilt, which basically means I’m sewing strips of fabric together and then making them into a pattern from that. There’s eight fabrics, and then I’ll do a black background. I’m going to machine quilt the center but may do hand quilted hearts on the border. We’ll see how much time I have, because I do still have to do Kid 3’s quilt and the matching doll quilt I decided to make.

My bigger kids are gone for the weekend, so I hired Kid 1’s best friend as a mother’s helper for two hours so I could sew. Worth every penny, and then some! She played play doh with them, took Kid 4 to the potty any time she needed her to, cleaned the toy room, mopped up juice that someone spilled, listened to silly stories from both little ones, and all of those little things that typically keep me from sewing until I’m too tired to bother. It probably seemed like easy cash to her because I paid her quite well for two hours of non-work, but I’d have paid her more if I could have afforded it. She’s homeschooled and does her work when her mom is home from work in the evenings, so I may hire her back a few more times.

Yes, I do have teenagers of my own that can do it in the off hours but getting kid 1 to do anything other than Facebook is a chore, kid 2 picks fights, kid 3 whines, and they’re more work than the kids they’re supposed to be tending to. I’m sure kid 1 is a stupendous babysitter when she’s watching someone else’s kids. She is great with kids. Just not her siblings… (Well, she’s great with the little ones as far as getting along with them. She’s just not much help unless I force the issue.)

When the mother’s helper got here, kid 4 told her that she was her favorite. The helper said “What about Mommy?” She said “Yeah… and Daddy. I really love him.” She talked nonstop about her Daddy. I could hear her between passes with the sewing machine. It was so incredibly cute.

Kid 5 did really well, too. A year ago, it wouldn’t have mattered that he already knows her. He would have scanned the room, saw I wasn’t in it, and screamed. I was afraid I was having her over for nothing, because I didn’t see him staying calm for long, but I was pleasantly surprised. He played and laughed and chattered, and he was okay knowing I was in another room. Toward the end of the two hours, he was coming to the gate at the doorway of the room I was in to tell me things, like how they were going in a cave (pretend play) but it was only because he wanted to share it, not because he needed me.

It was really nice to be able to get something done and not have to have that tense spidey sense of being a parent at the same time. It was nice to not have to stop what I was doing every 3 seconds to help someone with something so I couldn’t accomplish anything. It was nice not to have to guard my project from little fingers. Most of all, it was nice to actually get something done. I don’t know how moms manage to work at home without something like this. I can’t even manage to sew a freaking blanket without a helper.