Target Quilt

So the day before I took vacation to go to my quilting retreat my coworkers were asking me what I was going to do while on vacation. They know I’m a quilter, but when I proceeded to tell them that I was going on a quilting retreat and that I was taking vacation to do this everyone died laughing. I’m sure you’ve all experienced some sort of this reaction. People just don’t get it, but whatever. I explained to them that it was 4 days of sewing and eating and drinking wine, but they still didn’t understand why I would want to do that.

I work for Target and they asked me, “Why don’t you make a Target quilt while you’re there?” I told them while that would be cool and all, I actually had a lot of stuff that I am working on that have deadlines and people waiting on them. I categorized this up on the top shelf of my brain to do whenever I had enough time.

On Saturday night I had run out of everything I had brought to do. I was trying to think of what I could do with the remaining fabric I had and saw some white and red Kona. Well guess what I made guys…A TARGET QUILT.

I did reverse appliqué with the red behind the white. I wanted the circles to stand out more so I did 2 lines of black stitching around the circles. I knew I wanted to echo quilt the white and wasn’t sure what to do with the red. I was thinking concentric circles with those. Once I finished quilting the white, Charlotte, who was sitting across from me suggested dense pebble quilting. I had not thought of that and it definitely would break up the monotony of the lines… But man, to get the effect I wanted, that would be a lot of pebbles. Luckily dinner was ready and I got to stew over the decision for awhile. When I came back from dinner I had to do it.

I got through 2 of the circles no problem and then I ran out of red thread. I asked around and Sam offered her spool up. I rethreaded my machine and set off again, yet this time my thread kept breaking. It was the same company, Gutterman. Hmm.. I rethreaded, redid the bobbin, thread broke again. I lifted the sole plate and cleaned, replaced the bobbin, thread broke again. Adjusted the tension throughout the hi-lo spectrum, thread kept breaking. Tried feeding the spool from a cone stand, still kept breaking. Changed spools, it STILL kept shredding. The weird thing is that it would work great on my test piece and then as soon as I would go back to the actual quilt, would break again, and only with the red thread. Almost 2 hours later I gave up. I decided to put it away and deal with it at home and not waste my time and energy dealing with finicky thread.

Once I got home, things worked better, but still not perfect. Instead of only lasting 5 seconds, it would last 15, or sometimes 30. Finally after doing it in spurts, I finished it. Just don’t look at the back. It has bird nests and eyelashes, and I don’t even know what. And I don’t even care. It’s a wall quilt and no one will ever see the back, so there. I finished the quilt with black binding and took a toothbrush to the raw edges to fray them for more dimension.

It’s good enough for me, and now I can take it to work and say, “Hey look, bee tee dub’s, I made a Target quilt. So take that.”