How Long Does It Take...

to make a quilt?

I'm sure that every quilter out there has been asked that at least once, if not a dozen times. How long? I don't know. It depends upon the quilt.

Well, I can tell you EXACTLY how long it took to make this quilt...sort of.

It was/is a quilt-for-hire, that I delivered this morning. It started with this collection of shirts. My customer wanted me to make a memory quilt from her dad's Hawaiian shirts. It needed to be something special.

I went shopping in both my stash and quilt stores to find some coordinating background possibilities.

It took 5 hours to dismantle the shirts. Twenty minutes a shirt - I timed myself three times - to cut off collars and buttons and labels and buttonholes and sleeves...you get the idea.

Once dismantled, they needed to be cut into useful pieces. At the front of the photo are pieces of an inner border. At the back of the cutting mat are outer borders.

Making the top took the most time. This includes cutting

and sewing

and designing. It took 14.5 hours to make the top.

Basting usually takes a couple of hours, but I don't baste on the clock. When I work on a quilt-for-hire, basting is a freebie.

Quilting was the easy part, coming in at 5 hours and 22 minutes.

Binding is time consuming. It took 1 hour and 39 minutes to make the binding and attach it by machine. To time the handstitching on the back, I stitched for 10 minutes and measured the distance covered. I can stitch down 16" in 10 minutes, if I'm completely focused. We'll calculate 3 hours to bind 300", even though it really took about 5 hours when all was said and done.

And there you go. Thirty hours, give or take, and you have a quilted memory.

We delivered it today. I think they like it!!