Posts filed under ‘Time Management’
Finished! Matt and Alyssa’s Wedding Quilt
The baby’s asleep — I can get a post up here!
You know what they say about good intentions… and what they’re used to pave…
When my friend Alyssa asked me, roughly a month before her November 2009 wedding, if I knew anyone who’d be willing to make a wedding signature quilt for hire, I jumped at the opportunity: ”Let me do this as my wedding present to you.” I was very sincere in this. Despite having already planned for 2010 to be my Year of the UFO, I thought this project would make a worthy exception. I love signature/album quilts; they’re such a wonderful tradition, and speak to me so volubly of Why We Quilt — they are literally a way for the recipients to wrap themselves in the good wishes of people who care about them. Besides, it was going to be a simple quilt: big blocks, straight-line piecing, nothing fancy. This wouldn’t take much time.
Ha. Ha. Ha. Because this became Murphy’s Quilt.
Everything started well: I prepared a basketful of precut 4 1/2″ squares of the JoAnn Fabrics Kona cotton in a nice cream, prewashed and ironed onto freezer paper, with a 1/2″ seam allowance premarked with blue washout marker. (I figured, mostly correctly, that a marked 1/2″ seam allowance would probably yield a useably empty 1/4″ seam allowance.) As their wedding colors were dark blue and chocolate brown, I brought along fine-tip Sharpies in navy and brown, which I had pretested for colorfastness. Dan made a nice sign for the table at the reception, explaining the project, and the guests did a nice job leaving signatures, notes, wishes, and even some artwork on the squares.
I had planned the quilt to encompass 25 Air Castle blocks, measuring 12″ each, as I wanted it to be big enough for them to share as a couch/cuddle quilt. I chose the Air Castle block because it’s simple, attractive, and contains 5 solid squares; thus the quilt could accommodate up to 125 signed squares. Projected attendance was roughly 100, and I made sure I had plenty of extra squares available to allow for mistakes, but as most couples and families signed just one square to represent them all, and some guests didn’t sign at all, I ended up with only 39 signed squares. This was fine; it meant that I could put a signed square in the center of each block, with a second one in the lower right hand corner of slightly more than half the blocks. It also gave me room to make an additional square to place in the center of the quilt with their names, wedding date, and details.
I had warned Alyssa when I offered to take this project on that it wouldn’t be finished anytime soon; there was no way I could start it before the new year, and she was fine with that. I was able to pull all the necessary brown fabrics from the leftovers from Window on Whimsey, but the not-quite-navy of the bridesmaids’ dresses wasn’t really represented in my stash, so it gave me something to look for on the Shop Hop last year. I then bundled up the fabrics, the sketch, my copy of Marsha McCloskey’s Block Party book, and set them aside. And then my life got complicated. I started this blog; I found out I was pregnant; three weeks later, I found out I was losing my job; and two months after that, I lost said job. Then I started traveling so I could work for the military dental contractor, and next thing I knew, it was the middle of summer and I hadn’t yet started this quilt. (Hello, quilt guilt!) I had taken the supplies to the April guild retreat, but didn’t actually work on it. In fact, I didn’t start the quilt until the weekend before my mini home retreat with Rhonda and Diane; I had started the cutting at my parents’ house during a quilting day with my mom, thinking I’d be able to knock out the whole top the following weekend.
Again: Ha. Ha. Ha.
As regular readers may recall, that was when I mistakenly cut a large portion of my fabric into the wrong size triangles, having forgotten in the criminally long interval between planning and starting that I had changed the block size from the 9″ in the book to 12″. And I couldn’t just change my mind and make either more blocks or a smaller quilt, because the signed squares were 4 1/2″ and could not be cut down. All I could do was get over myself and recut the pieces. Fortunately, I had enough of the brown and blue fabrics, and the cream was a standard solid from JoAnn’s, easy to procure more of, right? Right???
The first time I looked for more of the solid cream fabric was when my mom and I were in Pittsburgh to hear Bonnie Hunter speak, and we stopped into a local JoAnn’s to kill time before the meeting. I couldn’t find anything that looked like what I’d been working with, but I didn’t have a swatch with me for comparison so I didn’t worry. I started to worry, however, when I did take a swatch to my local JoAnn’s and still couldn’t find anything that matched. I remembered having bought Kona cotton, but I started to second-guess myself and looked at all their solids. Still nothing. Could they have discontinued an entire line of solids between November and July? Could there be a missing off-white that no one was stocking? I was really puzzled. I finally bought a yard each of the two closest matches, the Kona cotton and the Egyptian cotton, hoping that one or the other would look significantly different once it was washed.
And surprise, it did! Turns out, both fabrics apparently have so much sizing and finishing additives on them that they radically changed in appearance once they were washed and dried, and the Kona cotton was indeed the winner as I had remembered. Washed, it looked lighter in color, much more matte, and with nearly a seersucker texture even after pressing. If I needed a reminder of the importance of prewashing, this was it. Another obstacle surmounted.
I finished the top and also pieced the back. I’d found on last year’s shop hop not only a beautiful blue and brown large-scale Oriental floral perfect for this purpose on the bargain rack, but also a piece of Gail Kessler‘s life-size piano keyboard fabric, which I thought would be very appropriate to incorporate into a pianist’s quilt. It made the construction of the back somewhat more challenging, but I think it was worth it:
I then basted the quilt and started quilting. And that’s when the final round of Murphyness raised its ugly head. As previously discussed here, I had unprecedented problems with skipped stitches and frayed threads, especially every time I crossed a heavy intersection of seam allowances. In a pieced quilt, there are a lot of these, and it made me nervous about my prospects for quilting both Ruby Wedding and Taupe Winding Ways. Manipulating tension and needle choice solved most of the problem, but I still had to periodically stop, rip out, and restitch throughout the project, which really ruined my momentum and greatly prolonged the process. I was happy with my choice of quilting design, though: a virtually no-mark, Pam Clarke-inspired combination of continuous curve quilting in the blue and brown triangles and in the signature squares, with additional loop and curl embellishments in the solid cream squares and triangles. The light blue thread created enough contrast for visibility without distracting from the primary focus of the top. I finished the quilt with a scrappy binding of all the blues, once again using the Sew Precise, Sew Fast machine binding technique.
If this were a fictional story, this whole tale of woe would culminate with my putting the finished quilt in the washing machine to remove the washout blue marker and the water-soluble thread, and having all the Sharpie signatures inexplicably vanish off the fabric, thus ruining the entire project. Fortunately, this is real life, and I really had tested the markers first, so there was no final tragedy. I was able to give them their quilt on their first wedding anniversary, and they loved it. Despite all the roadblocks I encountered, I am happy I made this quilt for them, and it certainly was a learning experience! Therefore, I’ll leave this happy dance in the capable hands and feet of Mr. Gene Kelly, who danced happier than anyone:
So Quilty I Haven’t Quilted
I've been on the road!
quilty: quilt-y [kwil-tee] -adjective quilt-i-er, quilt-i-est.
1. Related to, but not specific to the act of, quilting.
2. Characterized by, connected to, or involving quilts.
That’s my made-up word of the day. I’ve been very wrapped up in quilty activities lately, to the point of being too busy to actually quilt! This has happened to me plenty of times before, and I know I’m not the only one: shop owners have frequently spoken to me about how they spend all day surrounded by quilts, thinking about quilts, but not finding time to make quilts. My free time has been consumed by some very quilty adventures, each of which is deserving of its own post, but I wanted to give you an overview:
Sept. 16: PA National Quilt Extravaganza and quilt guild meeting
Sept. 23-25: Quilting with Machines, Huron, OH
Oct. 2: The Airing of the Quilts, Tunkhannock, PA
In between, I’ve been working, traveling, and sometimes doing both simultaneously; I left the day after the PA show to work a weekend military dental event in Edinburgh, Indiana, then left again for Ohio two and a half days after getting home. I’ve also been trying to reorganize the studio, because machine quilting requires lots of space, and little things I hadn’t dealt with were piling up and getting pushed off the edge of the table as I quilted. (At least I didn’t do what I once did, and inadvertently quilted a piece of scrap fabric ONTO THE BACK OF the quilt I was quilting. That was damn unpretty.) I now have new thread racks on the wall, including one for cones, so I don’t have thread stacked precariously on the closet shelf any more.
I have also continued a project I started last spring, tracing my quilting stencil collection out onto paper so I have a hard copy of the designs I already own, without having to pull the big portfolio of stencils out of the closet and rifle through them for ideas.
I like the portfolio for storage (an idea I got from Karen McTavish when I took her wholecloth design class many years ago) but it’s a little unwieldy for casual browsing, and leads too often to my ignoring my stencils when choosing quilting designs.
Now I’m well on my way to having a full-size catalog of my stencils that will be much easier to deal with. I’m also flirting with the idea of photographing all the pages into a notebook on my phone so I have a portable reference for shopping; I have to investigate whether that would be a poor use of phone memory or not.
I’m also trying to get caught up with my magazine filing. [Warning: if descriptions of borderline OCD behavior disturb you, you may not want to read about how I organize my quilting magazines.] For the last approximately six years, I have made an effort to stay on top of my ever-increasing collection of quilting magazines by periodically going through them, tearing out the pertinent articles, photos, and patterns, and placing them in plastic page protectors. I then organize them in binders, with subject tabs separating them first into articles, patterns, and inspirations, then further subdividing the articles into topics such as how-tos, history, and interviews; the patterns into paper piecing, curved piecing, applique, big prints, holiday, etc.; and the inspiration photos just into roughly similar groupings. [Look, I warned you. I also sort my M&Ms by color before eating them, you got a problem with that?]
Every year or so I also purge the existing binders of things that no longer appeal to me or that I have better examples of, but the acquisitions far outweigh the deletions. Suffice to say I currently have four 3″ binders absolutely bursting at the seams. They are extremely useful references, though, and I consult them often. It’s much easier than having to sort through piles or magazine boxes full of intact but unindexed issues; and I’ve resigned myself to the idea that if I missed anything, it surely is counterbalanced by the usefulness of the system. (Not to mention, these days, no information is ever truly lost, even if I recycled the magazine it was in.) But as with so many other ongoing quilty projects, I’d gotten behind with it, and now I’m almost caught up.
And finally, before all this new learning had a chance to get old in my brain, I’ve organized all my handouts and class notes from Quilting with Machines into yet another binder. Once again, I had started this project last year, adding to a kind of half-assed “quilt class notes” binder that I’d started years ago but hadn’t given a good effort to. Now both years’ worth of QwM notes are in one binder, properly organized, to which I’m even adding photos I took of class samples.
So while I still don’t have any completely finished projects to brag about, I’ve been making the most of my last month of permitted travel before “my confinement.” All I mean is that the OB doesn’t want me to be more than an hour from the hospital as of 36 weeks, which falls October 23; I just like phrasing it that way because I sound like a character from Jane Austen or “Gone with the Wind.” And I now have a much better organized sewing space, which will allow me to spend more time quilting and less time trying to move or find things as I deal with significantly curtailed hobby time once the baby comes.
More on the actual shows and events soon! With pictures of quilts instead of binders! I promise!
Wonderful Things for Retreats
Writing my home retreat post had me thinking about a few of the items I own that make it a whole lot easier to quilt in places other than my studio. So if you’ll indulge me in some delusions of Oprah, here are two of my favorite things. And no, nobody’s getting a car.
Although I only participate in a few events per year that require me to have portable quilting supplies, the following products certainly were in use in my dining room for the home retreat weekend and are among my favorite and most highly valued sewing-related purchases of all time:
Although I have a design wall in my studio, made of felt covering a piece of foam housing insulation and mounted to the wall, it’s only 4′ x 8′ because that’s how much wall space I have available in that tiny 9′ x 9′ room. It’s great for smaller projects or for individual blocks, but when it comes to a larger project it’s great to be able to break out the big gun. I actually bought the set of three Cheryl Ann’s Design Walls at Quilt Blossom Festival a few years ago: 6′ x 6′, 3′ x 3′, and 18″ x 18″. They came as a set for a show special price, which I recall being around $220. I probably should have just bought the 6′ x 6′, as it’s the only one I’ve used repeatedly, but I’m a sucker for a deal.
My initial thought was that I would use these for classes and retreats, plus the occasional setup in the upstairs hallway for a big quilt layout, but the sad reality is that my 6′ x 6′ design wall pretty much lives in my narrow little upstairs hallway full-time. I take it down only when someone is coming over for whom I like to maintain the pleasant fiction that I’ve grown up enough not to leave my toys out. The cats also enjoy it; we refer to it as the Fabulous Kitty Fun Tunnel. (I’ve written a jingle. And no, I’m not going to sing it.)
This design wall is one of those amazingly well-designed and -executed things with which I like to surround myself. It goes together and comes apart very easily; the corner pieces have a tendency to slip off but that’s easily fixed with a little wrap of electrical tape around the tips of the frame poles. The flannel came preshrunk and is washable, which is very nice considering one of my most frequent uses of the wall is for spray basting. And for the (rare) occasions when it isn’t standing in my hallway, it comes with its own carrying case and breaks down nicely into a portable package. The manufacturer has recently come out with a new accessory that they have made available as an add-on to previous purchasers, a move that always endears a manufacturer to me: stabilization rods that will help keep the easel-style support poles from slipping on wood or tile floors. I haven’t bought them, as I’ve only used the support poles once, for a workshop; I just assemble the frame and then lean it against the wall. But it’s nice that I could get them if I needed to.
I coveted one of these for years, but the $249 price tag kept me away. Then I went to MAQ in 2007, spent all weekend sewing happy little taupe winding ways blocks with my sewing machine up on one of their tables, and came home with horribly sore shoulders, neck, and back. A few weeks later I attended Quilt Odyssey, bit the bullet, and made one of the wisest investments in my quilting ever. The Sew Ezi table is light, collapsible, portable, easily stored, and once again, very well engineered. It is customizable to any machine so that the acrylic insert surrounds the machine bed, creating a flat, smooth surface conducive to machine quilting and placing the machine bed at a very ergonomic height. On ordering, you tell the company what machine you have, and they custom-cut the acrylic insert based on information from the manufacturer; you don’t have to measure your machine. You can also get multiple inserts to use the table with multiple machines, as well as an insert to use the table as a lightbox.
It was very easy to initially assemble, and continues to be virtually effortless to set up and put away. The wheels make it very easy to transport to and from the car, but are tucked neatly out of the way during use. I use it at retreats, at classes, in order to sew in rooms of my own house other than my studio, to sew with my mom at their house, and I even set it up in front of my studio sewing table when I’m machine quilting a large quilt, for extra support. Love it!
It’s easy to fall into the trap of shopping for quilting supplies instead of actually quilting. There are plenty of quilters out there who manage to have the time and money to acquire all the state-of-the-art notions, tools, machines, and accessories, but never seem to get around to actually quilting. (I’m trying not to be one of them.) But at the same time, there is no denying that having the right tools makes quilting far more enjoyable. Perhaps our foremothers quilted by candlelight with just a needle, thread, and a pair of scissors, but I don’t think they’d have turned down an Ott-Light, a Bernina, and a rotary cutter!
A Tale of Two Purses
You know how sometimes, when you need to call or write a friend you’ve been out of touch with for a while, you catch yourself putting it off because there’s so much to say? Yet the longer you put it off, the more there is to cover, and you dig yourself a little deeper.
That’s where I’ve been with this blog. I’ve been back from Arkansas for almost a month, my guild show has come and gone, and each time I think about posting to the blog I think, Oh, but I still haven’t posted about the quilt shop in Arkansas, or the lecture and exhibit I went to at the Allentown Art Museum, or winning my first-ever blue ribbon, or going to New York City…
You see where I’m going with this. I’ve been doing the same thing with the blog lately that I’ve been doing with my UFOs, allowing the accumulated psychological weight of my perceived to-do list to paralyze me into inactivity. So perhaps I need to take a more measured approach to the blog, the way I’ve been attempting to do with the UFOs. Rather than trying to get all caught up, I’ll start with what I’m doing now. If I can manage to go “back in time” and catch up, great; if not, at least I’m not digging myself in deeper. Again.
So! What have I been working on lately? Purses! It most likely started here:
As I’ve doubtless mentioned before, I am totally in thrall to the Japanese quilters. I’m amazed by the idea that a culture with no history of quilting (technically, sashiko isn’t quilting, it’s embroidery to decorate and reinforce a single layer of fabric) and certainly no history of decorative patchwork, a culture which was only exposed to American quilting post-WWII, has managed to produce in just the last 60 years a community of quilters of unparalleled creativity and workmanship. I subscribe to two Japanese quilting magazines, Quilts Japan and Patchwork Quilt Tsushin, and am always happy for opportunities to see Japanese quilts in person. I love the design esthetic: the frequently muted colors (especially taupes!), the artful assymetries, the use of fabric printed with English or French text as purely a textural element much in the same way we use Chinese or Japanese logographic characters for decoration. Here we see the quintessential American craft, that is ours the same way jazz and rock and roll are, reinterpreted through a foreign lens in a breathtakingly beautiful fashion.
So every time I’m in or near New York City, I stop at Kinokuniya bookstore, located right across the street from Bryant Park, where they put on the Fashion Week shows (Hi, Tim Gunn!) and Sanseido bookstore, located in the Mitsuwa marketplace in Edgewater, NJ. There I spend some very happy hours browsing through quilt books that I can’t read, but the photographs are stunning and the directions have very helpful diagrams. Both the books and magazines are for me primarily sources of inspiration, rather than patterns I plan to follow faithfully, but I think I’d do OK once I converted all the measurements from metric to English, if I decided I had to make something exactly the way it appeared. I didn’t plan to just buy purse books, but these were the items that attracted me the most.
Then, hard on the heels of my NYC trip were several family birthdays. One of my sisters, when I asked her what she wanted for her birthday, said, “Oh please, don’t buy me anything.” I decided to honor the letter of the law, rather than the spirit, and made her a purse. Technically, the only thing I bought were the zippers and interfacing. She apparently forgives me this transgression, because she loved the purse:
I am inordinately proud of this zipper.
She and her family are big Star Wars fans, even having attended the Star Wars Celebration in Orlando, so I couldn’t think of a worthier recipient for something made from some of my precious vintage Star Wars fabric. My friend Joan was generous enough to share this with me last month, after I had quite openly coveted it at our guild retreat in December. She had bought the fabric when it was in the stores after Return of the Jedi came out in 1983, held onto it all these years, then made this quilt for her grown son’s “man cave”:
Joan's Star Wars quilt
I wound up quite unexpectedly being asked to hold an impromptu “Introduction to Star Wars” lecture at the retreat, explaining the story to those retreat-goers not familiar with it, based on the images in the quilt. (Fortunately, the regulars were all fully cognizant of what a big giant nerd I am, so I wasn’t outing myself.) It felt pretty much exactly like this:
(I couldn’t find a version of this scene without the added comedy title and subtitles, but you get the idea.)
So the purse is the Huntington Hobo by Pink Sand Beach Designs, and the directions were wonderful. Even the zippers were easy to do with her photos and instructions. The only drawback is that I wish I’d had a better quality zipper for the top opening; the big metal one from JoAnn’s hangs up too much. Hopefully as my sister uses the bag and possibly waxes the zipper, it will work more easily, but overall I have to call this one a great success. Which is good, since another of my sisters has already informed me that I’m permitted to make one, sans Star Wars, for her birthday in November.
Then this past weekend, we attended a birthday party for my 12-year-old niece. I got her a DVD she wanted (Up, probably my favorite Pixar movie yet, which is saying a lot) and some fingernail glitter, but I thought it would be fun to make her a purse as well:
This is Geisha Girl by Purse Strings, and the directions were great right up until it came time to put in the zipper. I’ll definitely make this purse again, and I’ll have to play with the zipper instructions then, but they just weren’t speaking to me this time, so I left the zipper out. But it turned out SOOOO CUTE! She was very happy with it. I wish I could have taken it to show and tell, but I missed my guild meeting last week due to an upset stomach — much as I wanted to share the purse, I didn’t want to risk sharing a nasty GI bug! Fortunately it was of short duration.
The skull fabric is called Skullfinity, by (you guessed it) Alexander Henry. I found this at JoAnn Fabrics of all places a couple years ago and bought 6 1/2 yards out of sheer love. (Yay coupons!) I have a Halloween UFO that this should be the back to.
I spent much of Sunday making the bias binding for Ruby Wedding. My parents’ 41st wedding anniversary was yesterday, and while I’m getting no pressure from them, thank goodness, I’m feeling the guilt considering the quilt is now a full year late. I haven’t basted it yet, but knowing the binding is there waiting for me somehow makes it easier to embark on the huge intimidating project that quilting this quilt represents. That’s what’s next…
The Featherweight And I
Even factoring in all the choir-singing we did for Easter and taking a trip out of state to see our nephew get baptized this past weekend, I’ve managed to put in a reasonable amount of studio time in the last couple of weeks. Which, of course, meant I was limited to activities that didn’t require the use of my workhorse Janome, since it’s been on the DL.
I managed to resist the urge to start anything new; after all, that kind of defeats the purpose of this whole project. Instead, I made what progress I could on the WIPs, such as making the binding for Convergence Birds:
Further motivation to get it finished for the show!
But primarily, I’ve been assembling Taupe Winding Ways. While that fits the bill of only requiring straight stitching, it has required an upsetting amount of UNstitching. Here’s the situation: I don’t know exactly how many fabrics are represented in those blocks, but there are MANY. So many, in fact, that one would think I wouldn’t have problems duplicating fabrics close together in a quilt top that contains 255 blocks. One would think that, even if I put the blocks together randomly, it would be highly unlikely that the same fabric would appear two blocks away from itself. And yet:
The EXACT SAME FABRIC, two blocks apart!
I have been very careful and deliberate in placing blocks, which is increasingly difficult as the quilt top gets bigger and bigger. Yet I keep finding places in which I have inadvertently put the same fabric (or the same print in a different colorway, or a separate fabric that looks way too much like the first one) nearly on top of itself.
As I explained when discussing this problem at a quilt show committee meeting last week, I can’t just let it go. I’ve been working on this quilt for so many years that when it’s finally finished, I want to be able to look at it and feel nothing but happiness. I don’t want to look at it and say, “Yeah, I should have ripped that out and moved it, but I convinced myself it didn’t matter.” I know myself well enough to know that once I’ve found an error, I become laser-focused on it until it’s rectified. It’s not a pleasant way to be, but it’s who I am.
Despite the two steps forward, one step back character of my progress, I do have something to show for my time. I have 5/8 of the bottom half of the quilt top, minus the border, sewn together (albeit in three separate pieces for ease of handling.) Since it’s so huge, I don’t have a design wall big enough to display the whole thing at once, which further complicates the attempt not to duplicate fabrics; I end up running back and forth between the upstairs hall and our bedroom, even trying to take pictures with my phone to make sure. Yet I still keep periodically pulling out the seam ripper. So is life. At least I’ve taken the time to seek out and try enough seam rippers that I’ve found my favorite:
My ideal seam ripper
But I got a phone call Saturday that my Janome is ready, so we’ll be up and quilting again soon! It’s been nice working on the Featherweight, with its beautiful stitch and its friendly little clackety-clack noise; I haven’t even burned myself that badly on the inconveniently placed light bulb this time out. However, ever since I typed the title for this post, I’ve had an earworm. And not just any earworm, but a Broadway earworm, which in my experience are the most persistent. Just like in “The Ring,” the only way to save myself is to expose someone else, so here you go:
There’s a Hole in my Heart…
…or at least in my sewing table.
No sewing machine!
I sat down yesterday to do some serious diagnostics on my sewing machine, trying to determine why I got the shredded thread on top and giant thread knots on the back when I tried to quilt Convergence Birds. I put in a new #80 titanium topstitch needle as recommended by the Thread Reference Guide for Home Sewing Machines on the Superior Threads website. I cleaned everything out really well, made sure the bobbin casing was seated correctly, and made up a new practice quilt sandwich.
That’s when I noticed that my free motion foot was actually pressing down on the fabric. When I tried to lighten the pressure on the presser foot, it didn’t move. In fact, the lever to lift the presser foot was acting up as well. I took the side panel off to inspect the mechanism, but there wasn’t any lint or any obvious impediment to its motion, so I closed it back up.
Here’s the part where I get annoyed with modern sewing machines. I love my computerized Janome MC6500; I bought it almost six years ago and we have made some beautiful quilts together. I love having needle down capability (I can’t imagine doing all the curved piecing on Taupe Winding Ways and Ruby Wedding without it) and being able to do buttonhole applique. I don’t use the programmable functions often, but it’s nice to know they’re there.
BUT: If this were a purely mechanical machine, I could do all the maintenance myself. I can field-strip my Featherweight, oil it, and reassemble it blindfolded (OK, I’m exaggerating, but isn’t that a cool mental image?) However, once they started introducing circuit boards, it got complicated. I’m not even supposed to oil my machine, according to the manual and the dealer; it has an internal oil reservoir and wicking system, and I’m just supposed to bring it in for scheduled tuneups, like a high-performance European sportscar.
So, defeated, I called the dealer. I bought the machine before we moved, but I still get it serviced 45 min. away because they certainly know the brand, and I’ve had excellent service from them ever since the purchase. My machine was due for maintenance anyway; I used to bring it in during summer when we were traveling, but ever since I had a feed-dog emergency in January 2008, I’ve been on an altered schedule. I confirmed their hours, made sure I knew what the technician wanted me to bring, and asked, just in passing, when I might expect to get it back?
A WEEK AND A HALF?!??!!???!!!
Oh, those best-laid plans. I do still have the Featherweight, of course, which pieces like a dream — better than the Janome, when it comes right down to it, as long as I don’t have to sew curves or anything too huge to fit under its little arm. But right now I need to quilt: Convergence Birds, Window on Whimsy, and Ruby Wedding. I guess I can officially give up my dream of having Ruby Wedding done for the quilt show in June. It was a long shot anyway.
The ever-reliable Featherweight
It could be worse; I have a retreat to attend the last weekend in April, and it would have been far more tragic if my machine had chosen to jump the tracks right beforehand. But I have that magical combination of motivation and some free time right now, and to see that run up against the brick wall of mechanical failure is very frustrating.
Oh well. Keep calm and carry on. Let’s see what I can find to do in the meantime.
Wailing and Gnashing of Teeth
I really thought that I was going to get a whole lot of quilting in this weekend. Apparently though, it was fortuitous that I recently read “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” by Michael Chabon, so I could be reminded of the Yiddish proverb, “Mentsch tracht, Gott lacht.”
In English: man plans, God laughs.
Since the office was closed Friday, and my husband was at a miniature wargaming convention all weekend, I thought I was going to have two solid days of quilting Friday and Saturday. I had plans Sunday with Rhonda and Wendy for a mini stitch-in, so the grandiose part of my brain that churns out the unrealistic expectations had me visualizing completing the quilting on Convergence Birds in time to be hand-sewing the binding by Sunday afternoon.
But when my mom found out I was going to be a gaming widow all weekend, she invited me to their house on Friday. We had a delightful visit (and homemade vegetable pizza with pretzel dough crust!) and both my brother and my youngest sister were there, which was a very pleasant surprise. However, between the late start I got in the morning, bad traffic, and then my reluctance to cut such a pleasant family gathering short, I got home at about 10:00 pm. No quilting Friday.
Saturday, I had a short list of household chores and food prep to accomplish before I could mentally release myself to quilt. I had also planned to run a couple of errands and go to the gym. However, we had a (second) full day of soaking rain with terrible wind gusts that made me really not want to leave the house. So rather than either gritting my teeth and going out in unpleasant conditions, or making a command decision to scrap the errand-running altogether, I dithered. I made my various plans contingent on one another, and ended up as just a big entropic mess. So while I did eventually clean and cut vegetables, prep the pulled pork barbecue, bake banana muffins, clean the bathroom, and put away the snowman decorations, it was very late in the day by the time I did.
I got some quilting in, while listening to the director’s commentary on “The Lost Boys” (RIP Corey Haim!) While I was originally just going to quilt the center Convergence area in an all-over design, as Ricky Tims recommends in the book, I realized upon looking at it on the design wall that my seams were more straight-ish than straight. Whether this happened as a result of carelessness when appliqueing the bird border or if there had always been issues, I’m not sure.
It may not be obvious in miniature, but those seams were waving like a flag!
So I took a page from longarm quilters and did some ruler-guided ditch quilting. I used the blind hem foot, which has a modest rudder coming out of the middle (less dramatic than the one on the edge-joining foot), set the needle to stitch right next to the rudder, and guided the foot with a 3″ x 12″ Omnigrip ruler, adjusting the quilt top to keep the seams straight. It’s not perfect, but it’s much better than it was. I used MonoPoly by Superior Threads so the ditch quilting wouldn’t contribute to the visual design.
I sang with choir Sunday morning and then had a lovely lunch and visit with Rhonda and Wendy, during which I sewed twisted cord onto two more cross-stitched nativity figures (3 down, 6 to go.) We really need to make it a priority to do stuff like that more often; I always feel so motivated and renewed afterward. After they left, I gamely trooped back up to the studio. While there were only a scant few hours of weekend remaining, I was confident that I could complete the quilting of the bird border. After all, at this point, I was feeling rather accomplished. I had chosen a fern-feather no-mark overall design and had experimented to find the best color of Bottom Line to use as my quilting thread:
The fuchsia in the upper left didn't show up, but the light green was visible without being obnoxious.
I had quilted for about twenty minutes, completing three big ferny feathers with echo quilting and little spirals, when my thread broke. Odd, I quilt with Bottom Line all the time and never have problems with it. Hmmm. I turned the quilt over to the back and found…
AAAAGH!! Giant knots of thread!!!
One advantage to using a different color in the bobbin than in the top is that it’s easier to see where the problems are. In this case, the giant thread knots are made of light green top thread, rather than fuchsia bobbin thread, but the tension looks pretty good otherwise. So I have to do some experimentation to find out if it’s a) the tension; b) the needle; c) a bad spool of thread (hey, it could happen); or d) an unknown unknown. But I have done nothing so far, except to spend TWO AND A HALF HOURS ripping out the bad quilting. I got it all ripped out Sunday night, went to bed, and I haven’t been back in the studio since.
I hope to have a chance to rectify that tomorrow. However, if I can’t seem to face Bird Convergence, if it seems too much of an impasse, I can always pull out Lemoyne Stars. I talked to Diane last night, and she gave me a great idea on how to sew the pieced border on before cutting the Bad Border, so I don’t have to worry about getting the measurements or the math wrong. After all, why work on a problematic project when there’s another, less frustrating one waiting in the wings? And I wonder how I ended up with so many UFOs…
And now, in tribute, one of the best scenes from “Lost Boys.” Michael and David didn’t sparkle one bit.
Progress Report 2/18/10
As ridiculous amounts of snow continue to hamper my normal going-places lifestyle, I’m trying to make the most of the situation by getting some quilting in. Not only did I finish all the border half-blocks for “Taupe Winding Ways,” thus finishing the piecing for that quilt nearly five years after I started it, but I also assembled the upper half of the quilt top:
TWW w/ border
It’s very gratifying to see that first of all, it really does look as good as I had initially imagined way back when, and secondly, that my curved piecing skills were pretty solid from the earliest blocks. I was concerned that there would be an obvious quality gradient from the first blocks to the most recent ones, but while I definitely got faster and more consistent with experience, I was enough of a perfectionist with this project all along that the differences aren’t obvious.
I’ve also been working on the applique to finish the border corners on my parents’ “Ruby Wedding” quilt. Trying to do decent-looking hand applique on a queen-size quilt top is not particularly pleasant. I’m holding myself to the same standards of stitch size and invisibility while trying to maneuver this giant weighty bulk that doesn’t let me keep the left-hand grasp where I want it. I learned hand applique largely from the Piece o’Cake DVD, so I really emphasize the position of my left thumb as the determinant of how long my stitches are and where they come out. I should probably ask around among the hand applique types at guild to see if there’s a better way to manage a situation where your background is HUGE. But I finished the third corner the other night while watching “The Cutting Edge” in lieu of the actual Olympic coverage. (Don’t judge me. I love that movie, cheesy ’80s soundtrack and all. ”Toe pick!”)
RW corner
This weekend I am attending my Embroiderers’ Guild annual retreat, where I started the hand applique for this quilt last year. Perhaps in the interests of symmetry I’ll bring it along to finish; perhaps in the interests of not lugging that beast around with me, I won’t. We’ll see.
I have also sent out “Kyoto Ink” and “Blue Butterfly Day” to Quilt Fest of New Jersey. Having had the experience of mailing out “Watching the Wheels” to Quilt Odyssey last summer, I was a little more prepared for the mailing checklist, but I still wound up sewing the additional name/ address/ phone number label onto “Blue Butterfly Day” while sitting in a booth at the Maple Donuts next to the UPS store. I took the quilts to the office (where there are no cats) and went through nearly a full roll of Scotch lint roller adhesive things removing cat hair before bagging the quilts up to send; this experience had me Googling “sphynx cat rescues.”
I always panic when I have to mail a quilt, but I know it’s an unavoidable aspect of showing quilts, unless I want to become some sort of manic quilt chauffeur. UPS lets me virtually stalk the quilts’ progress through the online tracking, but there’s always the possibility that something devastating could happen. I have to remind myself that, first of all, the quilts are just things. They are things that I made with my hands and I’m therefore inordinately proud of them, but they are just things. If they were lost, stolen, or destroyed, I would be sad, but I would persevere. It is worth the risk in order to be able to display them in shows. I have enjoyed attending quilt shows for years, and have certainly benefitted from the willingness of quilters from all over the world to let me view their work. It’s my turn to take part and enjoy both the compliments and the criticism, and if that means I have to spend a few days with my heart in my throat while the quilts are in transit and out of my control, so be it.
Today is my first day since Feb. 5 driving my car! We got it out yesterday afternoon (then got it stuck again yesterday evening) but I am now once again a member of the driving population and mistress of my own comings and goings. At least the last time I was stranded carless due to snow, I was living in a major city with subways; this was a whole different animal (probably a yeti.) So I can definitely, and gratefully, attend my quilt guild meeting tonight without having to impose on anyone. Hooray.
Snow Day!
So, I was supposed to leave for Rhode Island tonight after work, to attend TempleCon (a gaming/science fiction/steampunk convention) and to visit my sister and her family nearby. However, this happened:
My street, about 10 p.m.
It’s supposed to snow through the night and well into tomorrow, accumulating up to 20 inches. So even if I could have gotten on the road before the storm started in earnest, the catsitter wouldn’t have been able to get here to give our oldest cat his Xanax (oh how I wish that were a joke.) My husband rode up with a friend on Thursday, so I find myself 1) alone, 2) unable to go anywhere, 3) with a full pantry, and 4) with a whole lot of UFOs.
What’s that spell? SEWING DAY!!!
I would have started tonight, except I also woke up this morning with a very sore throat. It didn’t keep me from going to work, but I did stop at Walgreens on the way home, and I think I sort of panicked in the Cough & Cold aisle:
That's the real-deal Homeland Security fake Nyquil, too!
Judicious dosing and a cat on my lap while I watched RuPaul’s Drag Race (love that show!) seems to have perked me right up, so tomorrow and Sunday will be all about the quilting. Now to decide what to work on…
I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about how I should go about prioritizing the UFOs, and in keeping with today’s snow theme, I want to introduce Dave Ramsey’s Debt Snowball plan. Basically, he advocates listing all your debts smallest to largest, then paying as much as you can every billing cycle on the smallest debt, while only paying minimum payments on the rest, so that you get small debts paid off quickly and you build momentum for eliminating debt. While I can’t completely endorse all Mr. Ramsey’s personal finance advice, I think it has potential if applied to other areas of life. In a quilting version of this method, I would work on the quilt that has the least to be done before it’s finished, in order to be able to get measurable success faster and get me motivated to work on the bigger, more time-consuming projects.
I’ll post again tomorrow as to the identity of the lucky quilt! And good news in the mailbox today, both “Blue Butterfly Day” and “Kyoto Ink” were accepted by Quilt Fest of New Jersey. It’s a nice show, and they hang all the ribbon-winning quilts from Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival. If Somerset, NJ is closer to home than Hampden, VA, it’s worth the trip.
And Introducing the WIPs! Part I: Ruby Wedding
A handful of years ago, as I realized that my parents’ 40th wedding anniversary was fast approaching (July 2009) I started thinking about making them a quilt to commemorate the occasion. Of course, the first design I thought of was Double Wedding Ring. It’s topical, it’s traditional, it’s impressive as hell. No, I then thought, that’s crazy. That’s way too ambitious. It’ll never get finished. Do something basic and pretty, with stars or something. At least then you’ll get it finished and they’ll get to go home with a quilt on their actual 40th wedding anniversary.
I believe you can see where this is going:
Biting off, successful! Chewing, still in progress.
My downfall began with my discovery of John Flynn’s method for Double Wedding Ring. Analytical, nerdy, math-heavy approaches to quilting almost always appeal to me, so John Flynn is naturally one of my favorite quilters; I really have to muster up to take a class from him one of these days. I had also taken the plunge into curved piecing with my eternal WIP, Taupe Winding Ways (pictured in the blog header), so I thought this could potentially work.
Then my friend Kathy gave me an issue of Quilts Japan featuring Double Wedding Ring, and I saw a beautiful appliqued quilt that is the major design concept source for this one:
From Quilts Japan May 2007; quilter's name untranslatable (by me)
I decided I wanted to use red for the rings, since the 40th anniversary is traditionally styled the Ruby anniversary. However, while red is my dad’s favorite color, my mom likes blue, and I didn’t want to end up with the Yankee Doodle quilt as their gift. Then, at Seminole Sampler in Catonsville, MD, I found the fabric that inspired the color story for the entire quilt.
It really tied the whole quilt together, Dude.
I think this is quite possibly the only time in my life I have ever purchased nine yards of fabric at full price and done so with a song in my heart. If I hadn’t gotten it for the back, to my way of thinking, the whole quilt would have been spoiled. All the other decisions regarding fabric and color placement and applique design just fell into place after that.
I’ll have you know, I started this quilt more than a year in advance of the anniversary. I shopped for fabric on a trip to Massachusetts in February 2008, then made a four-ring wall hanging as a birthday present for my friend Rhonda in May 2008 to make sure I really could execute the design. I spent the entire weekend of MAQ in July 2008 sewing and subcutting and resewing my strip sets. I had as much of the piecing accomplished as I could and still keep the applique sections portable by November 2008. At that rate, I would have been finished.
Rhonda's Birthday Quilt, 2008: 42" x 42"
But then I made a whole bunch of Hunter’s Star tablerunners as Christmas presents. And then I assembled, quilted, and bound a queen-size Log Cabin quilt as a charity fundraiser. And then — I started appliqueing. I appliqued the daylights out of that thing:
1) the entire weekend of my EGA chapter retreat in February 2009;
2) the entire week of my recuperation from laparascopic abdominal surgery at the beginning of April 2009;
3) the entire weekend of my quilt guild retreat at the end of April 2009
4) while at the Ricky Tims Super Seminar in May 2009
and on and on, at home and at the office, in waiting rooms and during guild meetings, everywhere and anywhere I could get away with it. But there was an awful lot of applique to be done. The longer it dragged on, the more little deals I made with myself: OK, maybe it won’t get finished, but it’ll be quilted. OK, it won’t be quilted, but the top will be finished. Suffice to say, on my parents’ anniversary, July 19, 2009, they were presented with a top with three of its four borders sewn in place and some bedraggled Celtic bias tubes hanging off the bottom. They were surprised and happy; I was more than a little ashamed of myself.
Artfully photographed to hide the missing border.
I really enjoyed appliqueing the Celtic knotwork. I have learned a lot from this piece, not least of which is that what I hate about hand applique isn’t that it’s handwork; I’m just not particularly fond of needleturn at this time in my life. The bias tubes eliminated the raw edges, making the process not only pleasant but actually fun. I will definitely include hand-appliqued bias tubing in future projects — just perhaps not quite so much mileage.
I finished sewing the bottom border on this past Monday, more than six months after I asked for it back to finish it. And I still have some applique to do to resolve the side Celtic braids into the corner squares. Obviously, I already have the backing fabric, and I think I know how I want to quilt it, but wow am I dreading the binding! Kyoto Ink took me literal days to bind, and it’s lap size. But this quilt has to keep that beautiful scalloped edge. And frankly, considering how long it’s taken me to get it to this point, I should be grateful to bind it. Perhaps it will be ready for my parents’ 41st anniversary.
This is one of the many reasons that I’m glad my mom is also a quilter. She understands. I just don’t want to let that understanding act as an excuse to let Ruby Wedding lapse into UFO-dom.
