Wheelchair quilt: planning and piecing

It's ridiculous how easily I get chilled, so I've decided to make myself a wheelchair quilt.  I do have something already, a length of black polar fleece folded over double.  Only it always blows up in the wind, and it's hardly inspiring, and tends to get lost in the cupboard and never used.  For this quilt, I plan to do something nifty with velcro so that I can easily attach it to the footplates, and the quilt will moonlight as an extra layer to grab for the bed or sofa when needed. The fleece is a good size, 36" x 30".

There were lots of triangular bits left over from the stripes I used for R's bedspread, due to cutting all those quarter-square triangles, so I went for 3" half-square triangles (HSTs), with random placement.  I've fancied doing a randomised HST quilt for a while, and when hunting through photos of quilts made with striped fabrics on Pinterest, came across the 80s and 90s quilts of Michael James, which helped me visualise it.  I still have a bag full of scraps, but a lot of them made it into this quilt, and it was surprisingly easy to mark up and cut.  It took only a few days to cut the 238 triangles required, and then a day for putting them up on the design wall, staring at it, and rearranging until I was happy.  I've never designed a quilt top so fast, it's amazingly liberating, and everyone has been blown away by it.

Nifty, eh?  I cut most of the pieces before I started to arrange them on the wall, then cut the last few based on what I felt it needed.  They're almost all Kaffe Fassett woven stripes, plus a Peppered Cotton in green.  I'd put in one in rust, too, but it looked oddly dirty next to the stripes.

There's a little mini design board on my sewing desk, made from polystyrene board and some batting, and that's enough to hold 20 of these blocks at once, so I'm transferring a sixth of the top to that at a time for piecing, and have made the first section.  I photographed it and refer to that, and still ended up with one block rotated by 180 degrees, but it's a flexible design and it looks fine.  The blues and greens are the ones I'm pickier about.  What is really striking is how much smaller the pieces are when sewn.  It's only a 1/4" seam allowance, but the area ends up 40% less.  Here's the mini design board with the blocks on the left sewn.

Robert Kaufman Shetland flannel

This quilt is intended to be small but really warm.  I'm going to use two layers of Polydown, a fairly high-loft batting, and a Robert Kaufman flannel on the back, one of his Shetland flannel range in a gorgeous herringbone weave and the "pumpkin" colourway.  I've got quite a few of these flannels tucked away in my stash, as I have plans to make some heavy quilts in the future.

The next question is how to quilt it.  Crowfooting would be too busy, and while I may be up to big stitch quilting on the right combintion of fabrics and batting, this isn't that.

So I looked at the tacking stitches available again.  Cross stich has never really appealed to me, and neither does the Mennonite tack, which forms an elongated cross and looks a bit too religious for my taste.  I'm not from a Christian background, and probably wouldn't want it on my quilts even if I were.  (This is also why you won't see me doing the cross blocks popular in improv piecing.)


The stich I've decided on is the Methodist knot.  There are instructions for all of these tacking stitches in the book Rotary Riot, by Judy Hopkins and Nancy Martin, and someone was kind enough to send me photographs of the relevant pages.  I believe they can also be classified as a form of utility quilting, and tacking doesn't seem quite right to me, it sounds too much like basting when it's a permanent form of stitching, not to mention that I'm spacing it relatively closely.  This knot is formed by making two backstitches, one long and one short, looking rather like an exclamation mark and leaving a single horizontal stitch on the back of the quilt.  I've made up a sample sandwich and it works out nicely, with a surprising amount of texture and direction added by the lopsided stitch.  There's a lovely variegated DMC embroidery thread in copper/rust tones which looks perfect against the quilt, and groups online tell me I should be OK using embroidery thread, though I'll test first in case of bleeding.

I'll stitch a line down the centre diagonal of each triangle, which will bring out the pattern and mean that my lines of stitching are a nice 2" apart.  After drawing it out at full scale, I think I'll go for two stitches per triangle rather than three, though both look good.  The spacing on the samples are closer, more like how it would be with three stitches per triangle.  It still obeys my rule of doubling the distance between stitches for the distance between lines of stitching at a minimum, and judging from my sample piece, will still create the effect of lines of quilting in terms of indenttion.  It's been suggested to me that it shouldn't be too dense anyway, in order to maximise pockets of air and thus warmth.

Looking up wheelchair quilt design online was an odd experience.  I picked up some good tips - back it with flannel so that it's warm and less likely to slip off, cut off the corners so they don't get caught in the wheels - but mostly I saw lots of waffling from people who have never used a wheelchair and haven't bothered to consult any wheelchair users.  You could practically make a bingo card.

* well over a foot too long and/or wide. Bonus points for being two feet too long!

* top of quilt drapes over the wheels so that they can't be pushed

* bottom of quilt trails on ground

* quilt has entirely eaten the wheelchair user

* headless model in photos

* remarks about how the quilt is needed "in case your skirt or dress rides up" (we can pick our own clothing and be sexy if we want to, OK?)

* "wheelchair bound" or "confined to a wheelchair" (it's not a bondage accessory)

* telling people to buy it for the wheelchair user, rather than being anything an actual wheelchair user would pick

* three quilt blocks and acres of border, leading to a rather odd apron effect, and always combined with an unbelievably twee design

* footplates entirely absent, and the grinning Random Old Lady Model wearing slippers

* size explicitly designed around multiples of a quilt block, rather than what will actually fit the user

* batting skipped, resulting in a quilt that won't be nearly warm enough (we tend to run colder than people who are walking about)

I ask you.  Thankfully I did chat to some quilters who are wheelchair users, and a few more people who have worked with wheelchair users and respect us, rather than the dreaded "well I made quilts for an old people's home once" ones.  It's always depressing how many people think they should get cookies for merely knowing someone disabled.  We're a sixth of the population!  Of course you know some of us!  And if we say we want batting that dries quickly in case we get caught in the rain, we do know what we're talking about!