Toasty and warm

H:

Yay!  The quilt is done... okay this one is 99.9999999% finished.  The only reason why I can't chock this up as a finished object is due to the fact that as I was unzipping the bag at home I found part of the seam had pulled away from the zipper!  About five inches will need to be reattached but that will wait until I can one again borrow the sewing machine from my cousin.  The material was very slippery and some of the fabric shifted underneath without me noticing (probably while I was pinning).  Ended up for those five inches I only caught the edge of the fabric.  Just enough to hold it for a few uses and then it pulled away.  I tugged on the rest of the seam and happily only found this one point of error. 

The last phase of the quilt's construction was tying all the layers together with yarn.  I've used this method on traditional quilts so I knew what I was doing.  This was going to be easy!

All set to start the quilting process.

Tools needed: scissors, yarn, a large eyed needle and a spacer block.  The block is used to create a knot that rides on top of the quilt and prevents the "ties" from compressing the batting so that maximum loft is maintained and thus maximum warmth.

I used a Sharpie to mark the placement of the ties.

Next I used the needle to run the thread from top to bottom, over a 1/4 inch, back to the top, over to then over to the next stitch point.  

I would cut off about a yard of yarn at a time which would give me a row or so of running stitches.  Once I my yard of yarn was used up I'd cut between the stitch points and tie them off.

The spacer block was pressed down against the fabric, temporarily crushing the insulation.  The yarn was pulled up above the block and I used a square knot to tie the yarn in place.  Finally I removed the spacer block leaving a gap between the knot and the quilt layers.

I trimmed the yarn a little closer to the knot then fluffed the quilt so the knots sat lightly on top.

The finished quilt!  (Almost finished, I didn't find the gap in the seam until I got home so at this point I was pretty excited).  The right side of this photo shoes the pointed toe end where I folded up the base and sewed two edges together to form a pocket for the feet.  The drafter stopper that caused me so much grief before can clearly be seen around the edge.

And how ingenious... the quilt unzips horizontally to form halves that each hiker can carry for weight distribution and extra warmth if you get stopped somewhere and need to wrap up.  I ran around for a bit with the pocket on my head like a hood and might just be doing that on the trail, it was nicely warm.  Someone asked me why it didn't zip vertically (from top to bottom).  The reason is that the zipper would be about twice the length (and thus twice the weight) of the one that separates the quilt horizontally, and also twice as much potential for failure.

After the pinning fiasco I decided to read the rest of the instructions, thoroughly imprinting them into my memory for life.  Which worked out great because when we reached my cousin's I found that the instructions were over an hour's dive away, neatly stacked up on my desk at home.  No problem, all I have left to do is tie the quilt together, I'd read his instructions, I've done it oodles of times before on traditional quilts.  I'm good.

I laid out my marks on the across the whole quilt, I even used a ruler to keep them evenly spaced.  Then I started stitching away.  If you look back to the pictures where I was showing off my amazing running stitches you'll say to yourself: "those look nice and even and tidy."  While I was stitching those I kept saying: "there's no way they included enough yarn in this kit for all these ties!"

Of course my cousin had a ton of black acrylic yarn sitting around in her yarn stash (she really did), so there was no question of actually running out, I'd get the quilt finished with what I had on hand.  But why was there not enough yarn in the kit?

Apparently I didn't imprint the instructions like I'd thought.  After four rows or so I decided to look up images of the quilt on the website I bought the kit from.  Hm... those ties on their quilts don't appear to be 4 inches apart, more like 8 or 12 inches even.  Ah... that's the problem.  Well, the quilt was suddenly going to get done a whole lot quicker.

All my years of making traditional quilts caused an overwhelming urge to make sure the stitching was a maximum of 4 inches apart which overrode whatever directions came with this camping quilt.  When making a traditional quilt and using sewing thread the stitching needs more support than these ties and as a result you need them to be closer together.  Not for this project!

I quickly finished off tying the quilt and it was time for testing!

Here we are testing out the finished quilt, (yeah, yeah, almost finished, but remember at this point we were blissfully unaware of the seam that would soon pull apart).

I was still moving my feet into place when my cousin took this shot so my feet are off the floor but the quilt will lay flat on the ground when we're using it.

The draft stopper is resting around our necks.  On very cold nights we will be able to pull this over our heads and position ourselves so that our noses are just peeping out of the bag which will trap in as much heat as possible while letting us breathe.  

One more element of our hike is done... okay, okay, almost done!  Time for the next... another backpack, this one should go really fast and be super easy, I probably don't even need to read the directions, I just finished one, I know what I'm doing.  I'm good.  Then again...