Covered in Threadmalaka’s adventure in sewing

Whoa, it’s been over a month since I’ve updated.  In that month, I’ve done little to no sewing until this last weekend.  Well, I whipped up some baby bibs, but that was more frustrating than spectacular, mostly because I don’t have a baby to fit a bib to.  Anyway..

I finally got back to it when I woke up this last Saturday with an idea for a scrappy quilt.  My sister is graduating from her master’s program this coming Friday.  She’s crafty, too.. and has been making surgical caps for years and sending me the leftover fabric scraps.  I decided to take some of those scraps and make her a quilt.

I didn’t purchase anything (except red thread for the quilting) for this quilt, which makes me happy! I had to cut out all the squares for the pinwheels (30 10″ pinwheels = 120 5″ squares) which took forever.  I’m so lazy when it comes to cutting, I much prefer using pre-cuts like charm packs or jelly rolls.

Right in the middle of the project, I decided to teach myself how to paper piece.  It wasn’t hard to learn, but it was hard to do.  The scrappy star on the back of the quilt is my first paper peicing experience.  I love the way it turned out, and I should try another paper peicing project.. maybe I’ll like it.

I’ve decided that I really don’t like primary color quilts.  Of course, this isn’t for me, it’s for my sister who can be summed up in one word: Red.

I didn’t intend to add sashing, but because my pinwheel blocks were all different sizes (oops!) and all different colors, the quilt was too crazy when I laid it out without the sashing.

Sashing is awesome, it leaves so much room for amatuer quilting mistakes but it also gave me a great place to free-motion quilt.  I was concerned with thread color, since the back is mostly black, but the front had all different colors.  I knew that if I used black for the quilting my mistakes would be blatantly obvious.  So, I decided to only quilt the sashing, which is all red, and this will also make the pinwheels pop up because they aren’t quilted.

I just went for it.  Meandering about, trying not to cross over any line.  I did have to cross over a few times, but overall I’m pretty happy with my spacing and stitch length.  Considering this is my first real free-motion quilting project, I’m super happy with it.

For the back, I put the pieced star (from the scraps I used on the front) in the middle and added panels of a material from my sister’s scraps that represents things she loves: shoes and purses.

Then I put a strip of zebra print, again from her scraps, around the panel.  I considered taking all the other scraps and piecing the rest of the backing but at this point I’d spent the entire weekend working on the quilt and I was done with piecing!  So, I made it black.. knowing that I had plenty of black material in my stash.

Here’s the paper pieced star:

I’m happy with the way it turned out, mostly.  I made a few mistakes because I was working with scraps that weren’t big enough.  Turns out, points are a lot easier to line up when paper piecing.

The quilting I did on the front loosk pretty good on the back since it’s only in the sashing, it makes kind of a grid pattern on the backing.  But, since the paper pieced star wasn’t directly in the middle, I ended up going over the red border of it with black thread.  Oh well.

Lastly, the binding.  I could have gone with a solid color here but I wanted to keep with the scrappy theme and use more of her scraps.  It took me an hour to cut and piece that thing, but I like the way it turned out!

finished size: approximately 50″ x 60″ - no where near perfectly square because that’s how I roll.

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You’d think after spending the entire day Saturday, the entire day Sunday, then all of Monday after work, and part of Tuesday after work on this thing that I’d be sick of quilting.  But no! I’m back on my kick.  I have the Stepping Stones quilt top that needs a border and back, and I’m ready to finish it! I was hoping I could finish it by Mother’s day (Sunday) but since we’re leaving town early on Friday I don’t think I’ll have time, and my husband might very well kill me if I disappear to the sewing room with a short deadline in mind, again.

Things I learned:

• Heavy usage of black material is annoying because it shows threads and lint like crazy.
• Free-motion quilting IS fun, stop being so scared.
• I need something smooth to put over my sewing table extension so that the quilt glides easier when I’m quilting.
• measure rows before sewing them together, I ended up with a really short row of blocks and had to chop off other pinwheel blocks because of it.
• Do as your teacher says: start your quilting from the middle so you don’t end up with a giant gather in the middle of the quilt.  I had to sew over said giant gather and although I disguised it pretty well, a real quilter would be completely put off by this
• Paper piecing isn’t hard in concept, but it is hard in application.  Give it another try.