Category: Sewing

Quilts · Sewing

WIP–Ready, Start, Resew!

Elizabeth E.8 Comments


Thanks to Lee at Freshly Pieced Fabrics, who allows us to totally reveal what clutzoid quilters we can be on her WIP Wednesdays.  Read on.

Okay, so this is the plan.  (I think I say that a lot.)  I saw this Rubik’s Crush quilt a year or so ago and it finally came out in a magazine (photo above) and I finally got it cut out, and tonight (roll the drums) I finally found an hour that someone hadn’t asked for and sat down to sew.  Usually I’d sit down and read blogs (because usually I’m tired at night) but it was either sew or read.

I should have read.

I got out my trusty-dusty quilty book, with all its pages and laid out the squares and the little rectangles that go in between.  I sew.  Somewhere in the back of my mind was a nag: check your seam allowances.  I promptly ignored that little voice because I was listening to RadioLab’s podcast about Games and it was way more fascinating than what was going on in my head.  Sew sew sew.

Then Ashley, of Film in the Fridge Fame (love that alliteration–we’ve been doing poetry in my classes) says in her instructions to press open all the seams.

What A Pain.  A Royal Pain.

But I’m good at following directions, so I do this with eight billion little seam allowances because I want to be a Modern Quilt Artist when I grow up.  Oh yes, and whatever Ashley says, I’m gonna do.

I lay out all the cross-strips and all of sudden I realize that I’m a good half-inch longer in my block strips than is the cross strip.  I measure the cross strip.  It’s cut accurately.  This is not what I wanted to realize.  Because that leads to the conclusion that I now have to resew all those seams.  I’m only off by a thread or two.  I can restitch those seams.  That’s not hard.  (Yes, there is another solution, but I don’t see that there is, so I charge ahead.  Keep reading.)

I start resewing.  And if you think I’m unpicking the first seam so I can press everything open again, you are pretty much nuts.

So I press them all to one side.  I know what this will do to the look of my quilt, because I wrote about pressing/ironing/sculpting seams and all that in the post just below (go look if you want to see an unclothed ironing board).  My blocks will have definition.  They will have some ridges.  They won’t be flat, modern-looking blocks.  I won’t be cool like Ashley.

So I have three inner-parts sewn now.  I have to make 17 of these and I have probably have nine squares in transit.  I’m really seriously considering disobeying Ashley’s instructions and making my centers 8″.  The quilt will probably recover from this gross error.  I may not recover if I have to sew eight billion (minus three blocks) teensy little seams again.  I have discovered the other solution: recut the center strips.

What would you do?  Cut new center strips and move forward?  Restitch?  That sound you hear is me banging my head against the wall as I grade student quizzes, so there’s just no room inside my brain for solutions to serious quilt dilemmas.   I could really use your advice.

Sewing

FSF–Shopping Bag/Tote

Elizabeth E.1 Comment

Finally!!  Something to show for Finishing School Friday.  I was despairing of ever having something to show again, as school has started and I’ve been slammed with busyness.  Today was the first day I’ve had to take a breath.

I was able to work on this shopping bag/tote that I’ve had cut out and partly sewn for over a week now. I wasn’t really happy with it during construction, but decided that today, before I started any other sewing projects, I would finish it.   I remember long ago standing in a new dress in front of the mirror while my mother was sitting on the floor, marking my hem with straight pins.  I didn’t like the dress at all.  I thought it didn’t flatter my perfectly fine 17-year old teenage-girl body in the ways I wanted it to, in order to catch Dan Ord’s eye at church.  I don’t know what I wanted, but I didn’t want this.  I must have said something to this effect to my mother (not mentioning the boy, of course), who mumbled through the pins in her mouth: “Don’t judge a dress until you get the hem in.”

She was right, of course, about this and so many other things.  I wore that dress out, and yes, got the boy.  But in dressmaking and in life, we have an idea in our head of how the end will be, but somehow what we are working on, and what our vision is, have a parting of the ways.  Maybe it’s because we want it to be finished, to be done.  And we are called away and so the quilt, the bag, the dress sit, unfinished.  But I kept at it all afternoon, doing loads of laundry, talking to the man who came to replace our windshield (rock divots from our trip to Yellowstone), and made a batch of cookie dough.

It began last May with Carrie, a friend, who came to stay with one of her friends, Gina.  We hung out together for two days, goofing off, playing, eating pastries at 4 p.m. in the afternoon and ruining our dinner, but who cared?  When she and Gina left, they presented me with two swaths of quilt fabric: the raindrops print in blue and green and the wild floral print.  I loved them both, and couldn’t decide between the two for lining the bag. So, I used both.

I finished the last of the top-stitching a few minutes ago, shook it out, and wow.  I liked it!  It’s the old put-in-the-hem principle at work, one more time.

In case you didn’t go and visit and read about being my slammed by school post on the other blog, here’s one of the pictures for you, a dreamy pastoral sunset scene, taken in Paris, Idaho.  Enjoy, and have a good weekend!

Sewing

Slow Saturday

Elizabeth E.Leave a comment

I felt like I’d spent the week inside a front-loading washer, going round and round, getting soggier and more wrung out by the minute.  And this was a pretty okay week, really.  Good visits by family, good chats with friends, but I just seemed to be not getting anywhere fast–and I know what that does to creativity.  “Too many irons in the fire puts out the fire,” an old saying goes.

And I missed FSF–Finishing School Friday–a goal I’d set for myself to publish weekly in order to stop and take stock.  If I had published something it might have included how many loads of laundry I was doing, how many trips to the grocery store to re-stock the cupboards after being on vacation so long.  That kind of [boring] stuff.

But here’s what I decided to tackle: making shopping bags.


I’m using the Practical Bag pattern from Grand Revival–an all-purpose slouchy terrific bag.

I’ve used the pattern so much, I had to copy it off onto some new paper.  Here I’ve shortened it to fit this Japanese canvas.  Even though I ordered a fat quarter, after washing it shrunk a little, so I folded the bag pattern in the middle to “tuck out” about 3 inches.

Here’s a stack of them lined up ready to be stitched together.  But I stopped mid-seam because my husband offered to take me out for sushi.  And a trip to Target.  Such a deal I couldn’t pass up.  Happy Saturday.

Creating · Sewing

Squiggles, AKA, Stipples

Elizabeth E.Leave a comment

It all started with this video, which I saw on Boing Boing:

It reminded me of quilting.  Of our famous all-over squiggle quilting, AKA, “The Stipple.”  But the gal in the video goes on to create some really interesting things.

When I walked through the Springville Art Museum’s Quilt Show, I, too, focused on the quilting, and on the different iterations of it, although not to the Hilbert Curve level.  And since I’m always collecting interesting photos of quilting patterns, I thought you might be doing the same.  Enjoy the show.

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