“Quarter past.” Gretchen gave them a searching look. “We’ve never misplaced an entire class before. When not one of our students showed up this morning, we sent out a search party. Well, I sent myself. I’m the search party.”
“I’m so sorry,” Paige exclaimed, bolting to her feet. “It’s my fault. I kept everyone back.”
“No harm done,” Gretchen assured her, smiling as she beckoned the students to accompany her into the ballroom.
Julia hung back as her colleagues followed Gretchen into the ballroom, murmuring to one another incredulously, shaking their heads, assuring Paige that everything would be all right eventually, somehow. “Wait,” Julia called after them feebly, but no one glanced back. She should explain—but what could she say that wouldn’t make everything worse?
Perhaps it would be better to wait until everyone had calmed down. Quilting would soothe their tempers, or so Julia hoped.
Hurrying after her friends, she found them not gathered around the quilting frame, as she had expected, but in their familiar classroom. Maggie and Sarah stood at the instructors’ table, chatting quietly as Sarah unrolled a bolt of forest-green fabric on the cutting mat. As before, two student tables stood side by side in the center of the room covered in a clean, white sheet, but this time, Sarah’s Chandelier quilt was spread out upon it, the top facing up, allowingthem to admire the beautiful patterns of stitches etched into the surface. Only the edges remained unfinished, with all three layers of top, batting, and backing still visible.
“Since today is your last full day of camp, we’re going to skip ahead and teach you how to bind a quilt,” said Gretchen as the students seated themselves at the remaining tables. “Yours is still on the frame, so we’ll practice on Sarah’s, which, thanks to you, is finally quilted.”
“Just in time, too,” said Sarah. “There’s a queue of Elm Creek Quilters waiting to use the longarm, and I’ve tested their patience long enough.”
“She’s kidding,” Gretchen added so quickly that the company laughed. “Well, thereisa queue, but we’re not impatient.”
“No?” teased Sarah. “I bet you’ll have your top for the Christmas boutique on the rollers by lunchtime.”
“The first step in finishing a quilt is to remove it carefully from the rollers, the frame, or the hoop,” said Maggie, deftly steering the class back on topic. “We’ll show you how to remove your Nine-Patch quilt from the frame tomorrow morning, but we’ll leave it there for now, so you can continue working on it after our binding lesson.”
First, Sarah explained, they would trim the batting and the backing even with the quilt top. “Some quilters prefer to use a ruler and rotary cutter,” she noted, taking a gleaming pair of dressmaker’s shears in hand, “but we’re doing this Sadie Henderson style, with scissors.”
“I doubt that my great-grandmother ever had scissors that nice,” Ellen observed as Sarah bent over her quilt, smoothed the edge flat with a long acrylic ruler, and carefully trimmed the excess batting and backing until all three layers were even.
After a while, Sarah handed off the scissors to Edna and invited her to take a turn. After a few minutes, Edna inspected her work, nodded in satisfaction, and beckoned Paige to take over. Her violet eyes still puffy from crying, she painstakingly cut along the edge untilshe reached the corner. Uncertain how to proceed, she glanced questioningly to Sarah, who stepped in to demonstrate how to navigate the right angle. When Paige finished, she offered the scissors to Julia, but Julia declined with a quick smile and a shake of her head. Paige handed them to Louis instead.
The company probably thought that Julia was demurring to give the less experienced quilters more time to practice their new skills. She had done so quite frequently that week. They never would have guessed that she skipped her turn because her nerves were so on edge that her hands trembled, and she didn’t trust herself with the scissors. One careless mistake, and she would ruin Sarah’s quilt.
When all four sides of the quilt were neatly trimmed, Maggie returned to the instructors’ table and explained how to make a bias binding to cover the raw edges of the quilt. As Gretchen and Sarah passed through the aisles distributing sheets of paper, Maggie recited a mathematical formula for calculating the amount of fabric required to create a strip of bias binding of a particular length and width. “You don’t need to memorize it,” she assured them. “It’s on the handout.”
“That’s a relief,” said Olivia. “I haven’t had to calculate a math formula since high school.”
“This one is easy,” Maggie promised, and to prove her point, she measured the length and width of Sarah’s Chandelier quilt, plugged the numbers into the formula, and determined the size of a square she needed to cut from the forest-green fabric. After cutting the square to size, she cut it in half along the diagonal, pinned the resulting triangles together along opposing short sides, and sewed a quarter-inch seam. Next, she brought the angled edges together, offset by the width of the bias strip, and stitched them together to form an asymmetric tube. Then, narrating each step, walking the aisles, and pausing at each table so everyone had a chance to see her work up close, she cut on the line to create a narrow strip on the bias, rolling it into a coil as she went along and tucking it beneath her arm to keep it from tangling.
When she finished, Maggie carried the coil to Gretchen at the pressing table. Gretchen folded the long binding strip in half, wrong sides facing inward, and pressed it with a hot iron along its entire length, making a sharp crease. “Doubling over the strip increases its durability,” she explained. “That’s important because the edges of a quilt experience the most wear and tear.”
“Would Sadie Henderson have used an electric iron, though?” asked Jason, tapping his notebook with a pencil.
“No, probably not, considering that she lived on a frontier homestead,” Gretchen conceded with a smile. “She probably used a flat iron that she heated up on a cast-iron stove. It probably had a detachable wooden handle to help prevent burns, and possibly a plaster of Paris coating too.”
“Often flat irons were sold in sets of two or three irons and one handle, so while one iron was being used, another could be heating on the stove,” Maggie added. “If Sadie had lived in the city, though, she might have owned an electric iron, or a model that ran on gas or an alcohol-based fuel.”
Jason regarded her, skeptical. “Seriously?”
“Seriously,” Maggie replied. “They existed by Sadie’s day. As you can imagine, though, they weren’t exactly the safest household appliances ever invented. They smelled bad, they were a burn and fire hazard, and they could leak or explode.”
“And that is why we’re using a modern electric iron today,” Gretchen declared cheerfully as she finished pressing the bias strip and rolled it into a loose coil. “Safety first.”
“Now we’ll sew the binding to the front of the quilt,” said Sarah.
“By hand?” asked Paige.
“First on the treadle sewing machine, and later by hand.”
Taking the coiled strip from Gretchen, Sarah returned to her Chandelier quilt and began pinning the bias strip to the top, leaving an eight-inch tail of binding at the beginning and matching the open side rather than the crease to the raw edges of the quilt. After that,with Maggie’s assistance, she carefully rolled up the quilt and carried it to the treadle, where she demonstrated how to sew the binding strip around the edges of the top of the quilt, removing pins as they approached the throat plate and pausing now and then to pin more of the strip in place. Whenever she reached a corner, she invited the company to come closer to observe how she mitered them. Even Julia paid careful attention, for mitering corners was a task she had not yet mastered, and she was glad to pick up a few new tips.
With the binding firmly attached to the top of the quilt, Sarah gathered it up in her arms and spread it out upon the center tables once more. “The next step is to fold the binding strip over the raw edges of the quilt and sew it to the quilt back,” said Gretchen. “Some quilters use a whip stitch, which is faster, but I prefer a blind stitch.” She showed them how both stitches were made, pointing out how the blind stitch took more time, but afterward, the stitches were virtually invisible. “Personally, I think that’s prettier, and then you don’t have to worry about the whip stitches snagging on something that might break the threads.”
