Former UFO

I finally finished my Floating Dresdens quilt!  

I really hate binding.  I haven't figured out a way to make it look great by machine, and hand binding takes forever.  I know some people machine sew the front and hand sew the back, but that doesn't seem easier than hand sewing the whole thing.  I have another quilt that's on hold because all that's left is to hand sew the binding and I just hate doing that.  I'll do it at my local quilt guild's next sew day.

Anyway, I bound this one with my Singer model 27...

...by flipping the backing fabric over the front, folding it, and sewing it down.  Cheating!

Finishing a quilt is a little anticlimactic because after all these months of work it just winds up getting tossed onto the rocking chair in my living room, or stuffed into the basket where we keep our quilts.  But over the next weeks I'll see my husband and kids wrap themselves in it, build forts with it, and take it to bed with them to keep them warm all night.  That makes the work worth it.

This former UFO is finally done.

UFO Sunday #4

I think today will be my last UFO Sunday because after today, my Floating Dresdens quilt will just be a regular work in progress.

I got lots of good advice last week about how to quilt my big quilt, but the advice I decided to take came from the author of the Mariner's Compass Quilting Project, who suggested dividing the quilt into parts and quilting one part at a time.

So this evening I grabbed a blue fabric pencil and (after testing it on a scrap to make sure it would wash out - what a nightmare that would be if it didn't!) marked out the lines for my quilt...the flowing lines I wanted, going from one corner to the other.

I also made the decision not to quilt the lines through the circles, and instead to quilt the circles by stitching around the perimeter.  This broke up the longest diagonal lines into little segments that ran between the circles.  Not too intimidating at all.

This evening I started quilting around the circles like Leah recommended, and it was a pretty low-stress way to put the first few stitches into a quilt that had been intimidating me for a while.  I'm still pretty new to using my Singer 115 treadle machine, but it performed beautifully and I have no concerns about finishing the quilt with it.

Now that I have some stitches in it's no longer a scary project lurking in the back of my craft space.  Instead it's a quilt that I'm eager to finish and see my kids snuggling under.

 

UFO Sunday #3

I really thought that last Sunday would be my last linking up with UFO Sundays at the Free Motion Quilting Project.  My list of projects that are undone or ongoing is relatively short, so after I finished my mug rug and trashed my wall hanging I figured I'd be done.

But, to be honest, I have one more UFO.  This.

My Floating Dresdens quilt.  I basted it nearly three weeks ago, and then rolled it up and haven't touched it since.  I know three weeks isn't long, but usually when I baste a quilt I'm on it the next day, quilting it up.  Not this time.

I could say that I was busy getting acquainted with my Singer 115.  I could say I was trying to get the tension just perfect on that machine before I quilted with it.  I could say I was trying to make headway on my double slice quilt, or that I was tired from returning to work for the new school year, or any number of things.  They'd all have a bit of truth to them, but the real reason is, I'm nervous about quilting this thing.

When I got background fabric I decided I didn't want a seam running down the middle of it, so I just got 90" wide backing fabric.  Dumb move.  That fabric is flimsy and I fear that it won't withstand sewing, then ripping out, then more sewing.  I want to get it right the first time, instead of making mistakes, ripping them out, and having a quilt that looks mangled and punctured.  I've drawn quilting patterns on top of a picture of it (Procreate is a great app for that) but I'm not sure it'll really look the same when done in thread.

I'm just going to do loose, slightly wavy lines going from the upper left corner to the lower right.  I think.  I don't know!

Last night I figured I need to just sew a seam in this and get on with it.  Living with a mistake would be easier than agonizing over an unfinished quilt.  So I unrolled it and put it on my machine.  I sewed about twelve inches and snapped my thread twice.  Stupid cheap thread!  I wanted to keep going but that was the only white thread I had (how the heck did I run out of WHITE?) so I shelved it again.

However, in that time I got a little preview of how challenging it would be to quilt a nearly queen-size quilt with lines that would flow across its entire length.  It would mean wrestling with the quilt a lot.  When I quilt with smaller designs it means making little movements and only shifting the entire quilt once in a while.  It would also mean having to stop to take out pins (I pin baste since I'm allergic to some chemicals and would hate to put chemical-laden spray baste on something I'll be cuddling with), which might affect the flow of the quilting.

I'll have to do some reading and planning, but it feels good to start addressing the issues on this quilt instead of just letting it sit on a shelf.

UFO Sunday #2

It's UFO Day at the Free Motion Quilting Project!

I don't really have many UFOs.  I'm chronically organized and I don't have many projects that I start, but don't finish.  If I have too many projects going on at once it actually makes me uneasy.  This is my list, and I'm determined not to start another thing until these projects are finished.

One project that I've been avoiding is my half-square triangle wall hanging.  A co-worker gave me a bunch of fat quarters and I planned to make them into a wall hanging.  I wasn't really feeling the design, but I soldiered on anyway.  I cut them up, but when I started to piece the HSTs I found out that I was piecing them with an eighth-inch seam allowance instead of a quarter-inch (I was just following the edge of my foot and not really paying attention).  After that I just kind of let the project grind to a halt.

You can see some finished HSTs, and then a bunch of fabric cut into squares and sorted...although, after all these months, I can't quite remember how they were sorted or why certain pieces were paired together.

I felt some guilt over dumping the project, but this is supposed to be my fun hobby.  There's no point in doing it if I hate everything about a project, and will end up with a product that I'll eventually dump in a closet.

I didn't really throw the fabric away, I just added it to my almost-bursting scrap bag.  But I kept some pieces out to try improvisational piecing.  I've always been afraid of doing that, but I figured that I'd be using fabric that would have been trash anyway, so I couldn't really ruin them.  I followed this tutorial and produced this little improvisationally (that's not really a word, is it?) pieced block.

I'm happy that I tried it - happier than I would have been with my lame HST wall hanging!

Let's see your UFOs!

First UFO Sunday

So Sundays are now UFO Day at the Free Motion Quilting Project blog.  Check it out!

In the spirit of finishing our UFOs, I pulled out one that I'd been putting off for a long time.

A mug rug.

The shame of it!  Who couldn't finish a little mug rug?  Seriously, how did I avoid finishing it for months?

Here's what happened.  My sister and I had this idea that we could put together a craft show booth.  My sister would sell jewelry, and I'd sell sewn items.  So I started sewing together a mug rug out of my less-than-favorite fabrics to sell it.  However, I ran into two problems:

1.  It's not fun making something to sell, especially if you're anticipating that it will be one in a long line of things to sell.  For me, it just takes the joy out of it.

2.  It's not fun working with fabrics that you aren't in love with.

So I scrapped the idea of doing a craft show booth and my half-finished mug rug just...sat.  It was all pieced and quilted, it just needed to be bound.  It sat in my sewing area, bugging me.  But when I heard about this project I figured it would be a good reason to finish it.

Today I finished putting the binding on my mug rug. 

Ta-da!  I'm happy I finished it.  I'm going back to work this week and it'll be nice to have on my desk.  I don't drink coffee, so I'll put my Coke Zero on it.  And, this mug rug was pieced and quilted on my Singer 66 (which is powered by a hand crank), and bound by hand (ugh...another reason to put this project off...I hate hand binding!).

One UFO down, many to go...

Check out everyone's UFOs!