When will I ever learn???

Never!!!

One more time: I should not cook while quilting...

15 min of scraping this pot, phew...

A First For Me

Mistakes happen. After years of quilting, the mistakes seem to be getting sillier and sillier. Like when you're preparing 27 feeting of binding and don't check that you're attaching a totally new strip to the end of the binding strip. This happened to me with the *first two* strips I sewed together. Lovely loop I created here. Totally useless, unfortunately.

Out comes the seam ripper ;)

Disappearing Marker

I've read a few reviews on marking pens over the years and even bought one myself last year. It's a pink water soluble disappearing marker made by Singer (like my machine - I'm such a loyal customer :)

I decided to personalize the Red & Aqua quilt for my friend's baby boy named Jack. So I wrote his name across the top and his birth-time, -date and weight at birth across the bottom.

The marking pen has a fine point and a broad tip, and I find that the fine point often doesn't show up or disappears so quickly, that I can't quilt fast enough to keep up with it. So after a moment of hesitation, I took the broad tip and started writing. It showed up well, though the writing was quite fat and I was *hoping* it would go away afterwards! (I'm not one for testing swatches. I never test cremes on hidden parts of my body, I never knit a gauge - no wonder things don't work out in the "knitting of garments" department... luckily, I've not had any disasters with cremes yet!)

Here's what it looked like about 10 min after I marked the text; you can see that the writing is relatively faint.


So imagine my horror when I sprayed it with water and the paint just intensified 10 x!

There I was standing with my water spray bottle (I wanted to mail the quilt the next day, so didn't want to put it in the sink or through the wash...), going pffft, pffft, pffft in rapid succession to get as much water on that section as possible!


*Luckily*, the pen label wasn't lying, and after a few more squirts to soak the fabric, the writing did go away, phew!


Maybe someday, I'll even dare use the pen on white fabric :)

Quilt Show Last Minute Prep

This weekend is my guild's quilt show!

I was there yesterday, "demonstrating". It was really quiet since I had the supper time slot, but I didn't get much done in the 2 hours I was there. By the time I had set up my machine, laid out my fabrics (plus made 3 trips to the tea room for cookies since I didn't have any supper) and chatted with a few guild members and visitors, it was already time to pack up again! I think I sewed about 15 seams max :) I was working on my blue string quilt though, so that's at least something! (Yay, working on my QUIPs.)

But let me tell you about getting ready for the quilt show (there'll be more posts about the show later)! I finished sewing on all my sleeves on Monday, hooray. (Turns out two of my quilts didn't need sleeves because they were draped over things instead of hung, hrumpf).

I had a tiny problem regarding the drop off, because it was scheduled during working hours. Luckily, the lady who chaired the show committee parks in front of my house on work days, so I could do a drop-off with her at 7:20 in the morning. That was Wednesday morning. Tuesday night, I packed up the quilts - all 10 of them. That's when I discovered that I never removed the chalk markings on the border of my WonderChain quilt. Uhoh. I had been told to remove them by washing and drying the quilt. Well, that wasn't about to happen at 10pm.

Pink chalk markings still here :(

I tried rubbing the borders together, but that didn't seem to do anything. Next, I took a moist rag, still not much luck, plus the quilt was getting damp of course.

Then I had an idea: a brush. I didn't want to use a used toothbrush and also didn't want to sacrifice a new one, but I found a potato brush in my kitchen (I never used it for potatoes, it was one of those purchases).

Salvation

So I scrubbed, scrubbed, scrubbed all around the border of my quilt. I felt pretty silly doing that at 10:30pm, let me tell you. But it worked :)

No more chalk! :)

With that crisis averted, I continued rolling up quilts until I got to my Imagination 1 quilt. Uhoh. Did I ever finish quilting that? Of course not *grins*. Well, there was no short cut to this one. I found three seams that were obviously unfinished (e.g. a circle stopping halfway around) and sat down to stitch those up in a hurry.

See where I'm pointing? That's where the green line ended - too obvious to leave as is.

There is more to be done on this, but it's filling in spaces and since there's not rhyme or reason to this quilt, no one but me knows that, so it's hanging in the show right now, officially finished, but you and I know better :)

How Could This Happen???

Okay, so I labelled all my diagonal rows and joined the brown and the green blocks one by one, walking back and forth to the machine because I was worried of mixing up blocks. I did well, no? Monkey Mechanic all put together, looks great, no?

So I made a backing, fairly simple...

Got to basting - I have hardwood floors, so I use masking tape. I hate wasting stuff, so I re-use the bits until they don't stick anymore... I just tape them back on the roll when I'm done - do you re-use your masking tape???


I was out of cotton batting but found a bunch of poly batting that's been waiting to be used up.

And then I started quilting - a very cool pattern, too (I'll show you later).

All went smoothly until I got to this corner. Looks odd, somehow, didn't it? Go back to the top of this post and check out the full quilt and see how long it takes you to notice.

Did any of you spot the mistake in the first photo??? Let me know!!!

I find it hard to spot when you see more than one section of the quilt, but it's a big enough mistake that I didn't want to leave it. Argh, a whole block to rotate!!! Out came the seam ripper.


Here's the same section with the block rotated properly. Are all the little hairs on the back of your neck flattening down again? It just felt wrong before the correction of the block position!


Don't ask me how, but I somehow managed to take out enough basting pins to sew the square back in by machine - the hand-sewing had seemed daunting and I didn't want to applique because the fabric underneath wasn't solid of course, just a 1/4 strip to sew on to.


Here's the block sewed back in. It's not perfect, especially since I couldn't iron the seams flat, and I have a bit of a bump in one corner, but I'll just quilt that flat, no problemo!


And to end on a positive note: here's the quilting I've done so far (all the green is done now, I'm picking a pattern for the brown right now) - I'm loving the effect, and wait till I show you the backing!! (another post ;)


Polyester batting sure make a quilt fluffy!

More Character Than I Expected

Time for a new quilt - again :) Nope, not that one, but one just like it!


When my mother visited me last fall, she saw the character quilt (see above) I made for a friend of mine and really liked the idea. So she wanted one for a friend of hers, who incidentally likes black and red together as well.


I got to use many of the same fabrics, e.g. the cheese fabric, skiers, dancers, coffee text and even the fabric that Ginny had sent me when I was searching for coffee-can fabric.
I went through all the same steps making the blocks, i.e. fussy-cutting the theme fabrics, adding black borders, then adding red borders of random thickness to get an offset effect on the blocks.


I was considering joining the Worshop in Progress over at Naptime Quilter, a fellow Canadian blogger, so I took quite a few pictures of the making of this quilt. The planning was already done, so I forgot to cover that part.


But I'm not sure I want to blog extensively about every quilt I make, from calculations to mishaps etc.


What do you think? Are you interested in the behind-the-scenes or are you someone who prefers to see the final product?


I did take some photos to show that quilts look fine even if things aren't perfectly lined up throughout the piecing ;)


Sometimes pieces are slightly different sizes or I didn't crop them down perfectly, but the next piece might just align perfectly again. I'm too lazy to square everything up more than once (just before joining rows), and generally just adjust as I go - unless my seams are off more than 1/8" - that much misalignment I can rescue :)


You may have noticed that I was working with paper labels to number my rows this time. I also pinned all the blocks per row together before heading to the sewing machine so nothing would get mixed up.


And wouldn't you know it? I mixed something up anyway! I'm amazed this happened, and I only caught it as I finished the last seam of joining all the rows. Two bare blocks together - that can't be! Horrible layout with all that dead space at the edge!


So out came the seam-ripper.


I'm sure there are many ways of ripping seams. If I don't care about the fabric, I'll do the slicer-method, setting the seam-ripper against the thread in between the fabrics and slicing right through it - there's a bit of danger of catching the fabric and tearing a whole, though.

Or you could carefully rip stitch by stitch in between the fabric, gently tugging them apart as the stitches release.

My preferred quick yet safe method is this: On top of the fabric, I rip every 5th or 6th stitch all the way along the seam as shown in the pic below. The I pull the fabric apart with my thumbs in between the layers and the rest of my fingers on the outside, such that my thumbs pull apart on the stitches that are a bit down from the start of my intact seam. The torn stitches will make each seam section come apart from both ends so the whole thing just plops apart.


Makes a bit of a mess though. You get one long thread from the back of your seam and 5-6 stitch-long pieces of thread from the front - they mostly get caught in the fabric and it's a bit tedious to pick them out.


So the funny thing about this was that as I had been sewing blocks together, I was thinking that it would be a pain if I put a theme fabric block in upside down, and that I'd have to figure out a way to switche just one block in the middle of the quilt and how I'd do that. Then I laughed at myself and thought "Just put them all in right side up!" and was at piece with myself. Little did I know that not 15 min later I had to do exactly that: switch a block. Luckily it was near the edge, so fewer seams to redo! I just took the two blocks that were switched out, but left them attached to each other and turned the whole pair around.


The fabric here was non-directional, so I could do that without now having trees with the roots pointing up!


And, as always: All is well that ends well ;)


Up next, the backing!

And today's special question: Do you have a cool way of ripping seams?

Bathroom Quilting

Is that a weird title? I guess :)

But I'm back from my visit to the States (Cape Cod), and while I didn't make it to a Joann's, I did find this tiled bathroom floor in a public washroom on a beach in Cape Cod near Provincetown:

It's almost a disappearing nine-patch, except it isn't, if you look closely!

Love finding quilting patterns other than on fabrics :)

The other day was wash day, or should I say pre-wash day?

I pre-wash my fabrics on hot and spin them in the washing machine before quilting.


Sometimes I get a reminder why I have a good reason to take perfectly smooth straight fabric and make it all crinkly, apart from all the work of hand-washing in hot water, hanging the fabric to dry and ironing it...

I don't know if Should colour catchers would have taken that much dye out of the wash...


Once again, I'm confirmed in my pre-washing habit :)

The Big Wash Day

So, I'm still going on about washing quilts! I'm just so paranoid that I will give a quilt away or sell it and the new owners have a bad surprise in the first wash.

So after washing my first baby-quilt last fall and figuring out that washing on hot doesn't seem to do harm in terms of shrinkage, I clenched my eyes shut and took the plunge - or rather, the quilts did. I also decided that young parents are not going to wash quilts separately with all the washing they have to do, so I threw all of my baby quilts in the wash together - I know DARING! I trusted that my pre-washing habit would prevent any dyes from running!


They came out just fine and are now neatly lined up on the rack to dry... Now at least I know that they won't be doll-quilts when their new owner washes them the first time!

Some Old Qulits

I thought I'd show you a couple of quilts made by someone my grandmother's age. They're well-used and -loved and still get lots of exercise keeping people warm at night.

Both seem to be truly made from scraps. I don't know if most of the colours faded or if fabric back in the 50s, 60s and 70s were just more muted than nowadays bold prints.

The first quilt is a simple 4-patch with 4 white patches in between the mixed prints.

The second one has tumbler pieces and is arranged symmetrically around the center length-wise fold for some reason.

You can see the symmetry in this picture.

Here are some of my favourite prints - they tend to be the bold ones :)

Yay dots!
Here you can see the symmetry again: how the pieces are mirrored on each side of the center line.


The edge wasn't squared off, so on two sides of the quilt the binding follows the tumbler-shapes. You can also see that the quilt is in bad need of some fixing, but I guess the owner (who quilts as well) isn't interested. I guess it's a true utility quilt rather than an heirloom ;)


Then I discovered by accident that the low light in the room gave neat effects when I didn't use the flash.


So I played around a bit, panning :)



I'll spare you the other 24 pictures I took spinning and jumping with the camera in hand :)

I hope some day my quilts will look as well-used as these two, and hopefully, someone will fix them to get another 50 years of use out of them :)