Please excuse the broken picture links on the blog. I'm in the process of moving all of my pictures from photobucket to smugmug and it's taking a lot of time. thanks for your patience!

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Quilting

I've been working on my quilt. You know, that same one I've been working on for what seems like forever? Well I did a pieced back on it and I will NEVER do that again. I hated sewing all those strips together and I hated pressing all those seams open (so many seams..) and then when I sandwiched my backing, batting and top I had trouble getting the backing to be nice and flat. Then I had no idea what color thread to use in the bobbin since there are so many now on the backing.

When I did the sandwiching I was about to scream and throw this thing out the window. First I taped the backing to my kitchen floor, smoothed on the batting, and then the top. I started pinning and realized it was really hard to pin without scratching up my floor. Plus about halfway through, I realized my batting wasn't smoothed enough. So I took it all out. I decided to use my cutting table so I set that up, taped and clamped the backing onto it (it's not big enough so I had to do it in a couple of sections-it was only about 6-8" too narrow so it wasn't a huge deal). I had trouble with the clamps, which seemed to be JUST exactly the size of the table when fully opened. I finally got it on all smooth, put on the batting making extra sure it was smooth, and started pinning. I was about 99.9% done when I noticed in one spot that the top was over the edge of the backing. If I hadn't done a %@#@# pieced backing this wouldn't have happened-my backing wasn't a straight line at the ends so it was harder to see that the top wasn't exactly in the right place. Then I noticed that if I had only paid attention, it was obvious that the top was waaaaay over on the other end and I had a ton of extra space. It just needed to be shifted of course. So I took out all the pins again (did I mention these are SAFETY pins??) and finally did it right. My fingers were sore.

That night I did some practicing with a fabric samwich and monofilament. First there was gray thread in the bobbin. I had to figure out the correct tension so the bottom thread didn't show between the stitches on the top. Guess what-the holes between the stitches look gray so it was impossible to tell. So I switched to dark blue. Not much better, actually. Finally I realized that a dark color was just a bad idea all around so I used pink. Much easier-figured out the tension.

Today I did some of the quilting. Let's just say I need a lot more practice stitching in the ditch. But the monofilament is clear so it didn't show a whole lot. I did all of the longer seams so tomorrow (which is actually today since it's so late) I will do the across seams. That will be the real test of my patience-to see how many puckers I get going cross-wise. I'll try to post a picture of the backing tomorrow but I don't want to post the front until it's all done. Once I get the quilting done I need to put on the binding. I also want to free-motion quilt in the borders so I'm sure that'll be a trial.

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