How it started

It began with beeswax wraps. Or rather, with the idea that if I could find suitable scraps of fabric, I could make my own beeswax wraps for much less than my local organic grocer was selling them for. Some research revealed that the preferred fabric for beeswax wraps was 100% cotton, so now it was just a matter of finding some fun decorative 100% cotton fabric scraps online that I could use for this project.

And that was how I stumbled into the world of quilting fabric. I knew quilting was a thing that people did, and presumably doing so required fabric but I had *no idea* how expansive, colourful, and enticing the options were. What ensued can only be described as willful denial. I bought a charm pack, a layer cake, and a fat quarter bundle(!), with the supposed plan of making a truly ludicrous number of beeswax wraps (spoiler: only a very small subset of the fabric became beeswax wraps — more on that later).

I soon discovered that charm packs (5″ squares) are too small to be useful as food wraps anyways, and started toying with the idea of making a quilt.

This part, the part where you get to play with colours and shapes and patterns immediately appealed to me, and I decided to give it a try. At the time, the only sewing machine I had was a hand-me-down Husqvarna Viking Sarah, which is a perfectly functional sewing machine, except for the fact that it can only be operated by foot pedal. As a person with paraplegia, foot pedals are the bane of my existence, as they require a motion (ankle flexion) that I can’t really do.

After some trial and error, I figured out a workaround where I was able to operate the pedal by wedging it between my chest and the table, and keeping both hands free to maneuver the quilt, but controlling the speed of the stitching proved quite challenging. In the end, I went with a very simple chevron quilt pattern because I had neither a walking foot (no pun intended) nor a free motion foot, and that coupled with my rudimentary foot pedal system, pretty much ruled out doing anything fancy.

All things considered, I was pleasantly surprised by how quilt-shaped the end result was. This was definitely something I wanted to do more of — and besides, I had to do something with my first (of many) fabric impulse-buy. That said, knowing that I wanted to move on to bigger projects, I also knew I would need a better way to operate my sewing machine. I spent a while investigating options for retrofitting it with an adapted foot pedal alternative, but eventually came to the realization that sewing machines had come a long in the last 30 years, and decided instead to invest in a newer model that offered push-button start/stop, and speed manual speed controls, among other features.