My front door is not completely airtight. I tried getting some foam strips to put inside the doorframe, but then I couldn’t close the door. I thought about, and started, a crochet tube that I could hang on the hinges to block the most air from getting in…

But in the end, I decided a quilt that could cover most of the frame/door gap would be the most effective, most fun, and most aesthetically pleasing. I had a jelly roll from Moda Fabrics and decided to do a bargello-ish quilt. I wanted to depict a quarter rest, since I am a musician and I want my home to be a place of rest. A place between all the noise and chaos and effort-giving to rest, restore, relax.

I sketched out the shape on graph paper and determined the widths of the strip sets. I used two “leading edges”, one for the left side of the rest (white) and one for the left side of the background that bounds the rest (dark flowers). I used lighter and less busy prints for inside the rest, and the darker and busy prints for the background.

As with a normal bargello, I assembled the strip sets and then cut them to the corresponding widths. The jelly roll didn’t have duplicates of all the fabrics, so I alternated the ones that didn’t have exact matches. Then I pressed the seams to alternate, and sewed the strip sets back together.

After some consideration, especially using a black and white filter on my camera, I decided the edges of the rest needed a tiny border to really make it stand out. I attached a strip of dark green as if it was bias tape, sealing the raw edges of the strip sets inside. Then I appliqued the background onto the right side of the rest, ripped off the unneeded background, and appliqued the rest into the extra background.

So that was the rest part, the middle part, done. I still needed two sides to make the quilt large enough. I cut a bunch of 2.5″ strips out of scraps and did a “jelly roll race” type of construction to make a big panel of stripes. Seeing as this area was meant to be busy and chaotic, I cut the panel and re-sewed it together on an angle a couple times. Then I split the panel in two for the two sides, and sewed them onto the middle rest panel.

Then it was time to quilt! I did my most confident free motion motifs: loops, “toothpaste”, and abstract geometric, and switched thread throughout. I liked just doing some freeform, unstructured quilting and filling the space with whatever I wanted. For the rest, I did free motion stitch in the ditch because I needed to change angles often and didn’t want to deal with moving the whole quilt 90 degrees every few inches.

I had to do two nerve wracking cutouts – one for the door handle and chain, and another for the peephole. I measured multiple times and then bravely cut once. 🙂

To affix the quilt to the door, I made a little frame out of wooden yardsticks (my quilt hanging devices of choice) and screwed it into the door. I used fabric loops to hang the quilt on the frame. And thus, it was done, ready for the tail end of this winter and many winters to come.

Project completed March 2025.