Covered in Threadmalaka’s adventure in sewing

Oh my goodness, I’m finally done with it.  I started a quilt for my nephew on Thanksgiving, and here we are, only a few days from Christmas.   That wouldn’t sound like very long, except this is a tiny quilt! It comes out at about 32×32… I should have been able to finish it quicker, but I honestly put it down for 3 weeks and didn’t touch it!!

After piecing this guy, I thought I hated quilting.  Honestly, I think I just bit off more than I can chew.  I wanted to make my nephew a baby quilt, but not a traditional pastel baby blanket.  So I used American Jane’s Recess charm pack.

It has bright colors and is totally retro, which I love.   I also love using charm packs, and this time I also used a quilt pattern for the first time.

The pattern is by Schnibbles, called Come out and Play.  I looked over it over and thought.. how hard could this be?  It’s small, it uses charm packs, and the instructions are right here for me.   I knew there would be a lot of cutting/piecing, but I asked my sister Elizabeth and my mom to help me when they were here for Thanksgiving.

Relunctantly, they helped ;)  Both of them hate quilting, and this one just concreted that thought in their head.  The whole time I was thinking ‘omg this is so fun!’ but they were thinking ‘omg, I want this to be DONE so I never have to quilt again!’

What I didn’t realize at first is that because the stars are not each their own block, I wouldn’t be able to piece this one like I’m used to.  Instead of piecing blocks, then rows.. I had to piece rows only.   After fixing it a bazillion times, my stars are still massively wonky.  In fact, I think I’m going to change the name of this one to ‘wonky stars quilt.’

I thought, this being my 4th quilt, that it would be my best yet.  It’s not my best yet, by any means! I’m sad that none of my stars look like stars.   I do like the way it looks from afar, without a quilting eye

And then there’s the quilting part.  This is what took me so long to finish.  It was going to be my first free-motion quilting project.  I was scared, but I was going to do it anyway - and I did.  Then I looked at my free motion stitches and they were terrible.  Now, before you start thinkng I’m too critical of myself, when I’m quilting I let a lot of messy stuff slide.  I know that most of the time the details get lost in the beauty of the finished piece.  But this was BAD, I had to remove them.

So I sat on the sofa for 4 hours, removing all my free motion stiches.  It was painful.  I put the quilt down and didn’t pick up for 3 weeks.  The only reason I did, in fact, pick it back up last night, is that I am going to see my nephew in 2 days and HAD to get it finished.

I decided I was going to re-do the free-motion quilting, but I would go slow and steady.  I set it all up, got ready, and went to town.  I was stitching evenly and slow and I felt good about it.  Then I caught a glimpse of the back, and the damn tension was messed up so I had huge loops everywhere! Ugh!  Luckily this meant that the stitching was loose, and easy to rip out.  I had only done about a quarter of the quilt, so it wasn’t too bad to remove this time.

I couldn’t do it again.  I removed the quilting foot and put back on the old trusty walking foot and stitched in the ditch a bit and called it quits.

Here’s the back:

Hard to see, but I have squiggly line around the whole thing, then I just quilted boxes around the inside.  Good enough.

What I learned:

• I’m not ready for this kind of quilting, I need to keep with big blocks until I really understand everything that I’m doing.
• Quilt patterns are FUN and make life a lot easier.
• I need to practice free-motion quilting, a lot.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with these quilts.  Give them to charity?  Give them to friends?  Hide them away somewhere?  Who knows, who cares?  They’re fun to make and I’m really just still learning.  Everyone keeps asking me what I’m going to do with these things (the husband, mostly!) and I certainly don’t have a good answer.

I finally finished the binding on my third quilt tonight.  I did it by hand, again.  I really want to take the plunge and do it by machine but I’m scared I’ll screw up a perfectly good quilt.  Ok, I’m really not scared.. it’s just that I couldn’t stand using blue thread that could be seen on the white border if I used my machine to bind it.  I did it by hand, again, and it was slightly torturous.

Here she is, it took me a few hours to piece it on Saturday, then a few hours on the backing & quilting on Sunday.  Monday I started hand-stitching the binding and finished early Wednesday evening.  So, it didn’t take all that long.

Here it is with the piece from my stash that I added on the backing.  I always loved this fabric, so I wanted to use it for something and keep it somewhat intact.  Of course, I didn’t have much of it left, so I only used a strip and pieced the back with yellow and blue:

Overall, I’m pretty happy that I pulled it off again without a pattern or anything.  This is my first quilt that I didn’t pre-wash, so I’m about to throw it in the washer and hope for the best.

Things I’d do differently next time (aka: what I learned)

• Pre-wash all my fabrics (I know better!)

• Plan my quilt size.  I ended up with a 52×52 quilt which would be great, except I had to stretch my crib-sized batting to fit it.  I didn’t want to spend the money on a full size batting just to cut it down.  Ok I HAD a full size batting but I didn’t want to waste it!

• I would have used 2 charm packs instead of just one.  I thought supplementing it with white would give me a twin size or larger, but I was wrong.  I had to add a 5″ border just to get it to 50 inches.

• I should have splurged on quilting cotton for the whites instead of using cheap fabric because it was on sale.  I learned my lesson, now I just hope it doesn’t shrink up so much in the wash that my quilt is ruined!

• The metal folding chair I’m currently using as a sewing chair is NOT cutting it.  My entire right shoulder/arm hurts so bad when I’m doing the quilting.  The minute I brought my nice desk chair upstairs, I felt 100% better.  The only problem? Then I didn’t have a desk chair in the office.

• I’m bored with stitching in the ditch.  I need to learn to free motion, stat.

Ok quilting is out of my system for at least a week.  I’ve got the greatest idea for a bag that I can’t wait to make!

I’m devoting an entire entry to charm packs… that’s how excited I am about them, right now.

What’s a Charm Pack?  It’s a stack of 35-40 5″ squares from a collection of a designer’s series.   They all ‘match’ because they’re from the same series.  This drastically reduces my cutting time, and I really don’t like cutting at all…  so that means I love charm packs

Shopping for them is rough, though.. because I want them all!  I have decided that the Fat Quarter Shop (clicky the link to see their awesome selection) has the best selection of charm packs that I’ve found so far.  I bought 3 from them, which should be getting here today.  I should have bought 2 of each, now that I realize I’ll likely need more than one charm pack to make a decent sized quilt.  What I love about these babies is that they’re $7-9 for 35-40 5″ squares.  That means I can make a full sized quilt for about $15 + solids, which I can get on sale at non-quilting stores.

That brings me to my point.   I ran up to the quilting shop that is right around the corner from my house - Ready to Sew.  I was so excited when I found that they had taken over the space next door and had nearly doubled their shop space.  This place is literally 5 minutes from my house, and considering I live so far out of town that nothing is 5 minutes away, you can imagine how happy this makes me.

After I ordered the charm packs from Fat Quarter Shop, I decided too  grab a couple from Ready to Sew and get started on one of the quilts I had been tossing around in my mind (charm pack quilt, see previous entry with inspiration pieces.)

I’m really trying not to be one of those people who calls their fabrics by name, but it does help to know the names so I can purchase more, online if necessary.  These are the two I bought on Saturday:

Here’s the quilt top I started on Saturday from the Nest charm pack:

I had to supplement the charm pack with a few 5″ squares from my stash because I wanted to try a little bigger quilt this time. I used cheap white fabric, which will likely ruin this quilt once I wash it. Last night I pieces together a backing, using solid teal, solid yellow, and one of the prints I used from my stash. I started the quilting, I’m almost done.

New techniques:
Sashing! I totally dove into this one, I have seen so many quilts with borders around the blocks and I didn’t know how to do it. Now I do! It’s easy as pie.

Quilt Border. I wanted to add a five inch border, and it was a little tricky because my quilt was already 44×44, so if I didn’t cut on the bias, I’d have to piece the border together and it wouldn’t look as good. I sat down and thought about it for awhile and realized that I could add a 5″ square on the corners, in white, and that would work.

Quilting from the center. I realized with the border, I didn’t want to start my quilting from the edge, but from where each row started. This was tricky because I probably should have pulled the bobbin thread up, but I didn’t. I guess we’ll see how it turns out..

Pieced backing.  I just can’t seem to make myself use that much of one fabric on the backing.  So, I dug into my stash and pieced it.  I’ve been wanting to try this anyway, and it seems like the hip thing to do

I was still too scared to try free motion quilting.  I did a lot of reading on it though and I think I’m going to take the advice of many out there and create a test sandwich to play around on, then I won’t be ruining a quilt when I screw it up.

Richard would ask me what I was doing quite often during this process and my reply was, as always.. “I have no clue!”

But it was most certainly a lot of fun.  Can’t wait to finish it.

I never in a million years thought that I would want to quilt anything.  I never had any quilts like most people did, nobody in my family had ever been a quilter.  At least, nobody that wanted to hand them down to me.   When I was taking classes at the Stitching Studio I started to notice all the cute quilts around the shop.

first quilt top -- not finished

Then I started browsing flickr for quilts that people had made and I realized that you CAN make modern, pretty quilts.  So, I enrolled in a 6-week quilting class at the studio.  I learned SO much!  Aimee and Jackie, my mother-in-law, both took the classes with me.  We learned a ton about color matching, so our first quilts weren’t exactly right when it came to that.  Since then, I’ve done much better!

2nd quilt, not so perfect!

On top of the small lap quilt we were making in class, I decided to start another quilt on my own in unison.  This one, I went out on a limb and learned a few new techniques on my own, outside of class.  Both of these quilts are finished, I just don’t have recent pictures.  Maybe they’ll come soon.

I laugh when I look at this quilt.  Although my instructor was impressed (she called me brave!) and told me never to point out my flaws, this is my blog so I’ll point them out ;)  I really did have perfect points on this one, it came together so easily.  Then I cut the solid squares out too small (bad math) and because I had bought fat quarters, I didn’t have enough to fix it without just cutting off my points.  So there you have it, a very wonky Ohio Star quilt.  I learned a lot though, and that was the purpose!