I am Marietjie Kruger and I have been piecing quilts in Clarens since 1998 — first at the kitchen table, then on a hoop, and for the last eleven years on a full-size frame that takes up most of the back room. Everything on this page was cut, pieced, wadded and quilted in that room. Nothing goes off to a longarm in Johannesburg and comes back with somebody else’s pattern stitched across it. One quilt fits on the frame at a time, so the shelf is however long the shelf is. A cot quilt is about ten days. A queen is six weeks, and five of those are the quilting rather than the piecing, which is the part people never believe until they watch it. If what you are after is not up there, phone the house and I will tell you honestly when I could start it rather than what you would like to hear.
Sashing is the strip of plain cloth that runs between the pieced blocks of a quilt. It is the dullest part to cut and it decides whether the whole thing works: too narrow and the blocks fight each other, too wide and the quilt goes quiet and dead. I named the business after it because that is honestly the job — the quiet strips holding the loud squares apart, and nobody ever noticing that somebody chose them.
Sizes, cloth, waiting times, or a quilt worked from a photograph you already have. I read messages after supper and answer them the next morning.
