Around the mid '80s I started 2 identical quilts for my youngest son's trundle bed. They were simple quilts, alternating scrappy nine patch blocks with squares of a wildlife print. I finished the first quilt then put the basted second quilt aside to finish later. More than a decade went by and the first quilt was falling apart so I finally decided it was time to finish the second quilt. When I took it out of the box I discovered it had been basted with straight pins! I replaced the pins with safety pins and hand quilted it, probably with 1/4" stitches. This was a quilt to be used. It didn't have to be perfect. When I was ready to add the binding I thought I remembered how, so I stitched to 1/4" from one end, pivoted, stitched to the next end, and so on. I soon realized my mistake but wasn't about to take out all of those stitches. Besides I didn't think my teenage son would notice the rounded corners or even know that wasn't the way it was supposed to be. When I presented the finished quilt to him, the first thing he said was "Why are the corners rounded?!"
He never did use this quilt, not because it wasn't perfect but because he didn't want it to become worn, and possibly because he preferred the comfort of the first quilt that he had used for so many years. He kept his first quilt through several moves until it was accidentally left in the attic during a recent move and damaged beyond repair.
Now the seam ripper is my friend. I use it often and recently removed the binding from a quilt because it shrank after washing and distorted the quilt. And I will never again forget how to bind a quilt!
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