North To Alaska

Day 170: Seriously, I did not intend to part with this Double Wedding Ring quilt, but when a friend in Alaska asked me if I had a quilt she could purchase, I told myself, "Well, you can always make another one." Y'see, I have a Double Wedding Ring my great-grandmother made. That's one. I have a rather plain Eight-Pointed Star, hand-quilted, which my Cockatoo Cocoa helped me make (he thought it was a bird trampoline), and I have my Cathedral Window kitty quilt (also hand-quilted). I also have a hexagon kitty quilt still in the process of being quilted (it went on hold when Merry decided he liked to eat polyester fiberfill), so that brings the total of quilts in my personal possession to four, and really, how many quilts does one person need? I'm working on another one even now. I decided I could back, batt and bind the Double Wedding Ring for my Alaskan friend on a timely basis, tying it rather than quilting it by hand (an option I had considered anyway). She was thrilled with the prospect! I completed it on Sunday, and will ship it off today. I love seeing my handwork go to people who appreciate it for what it is.

Leather Thimble

Day 168: I am a small person. I have very, very tiny hands, and when I say "tiny," I mean that my wedding ring was a size 4. Eons ago, when I found a leather thimble which came reasonably close to fitting my middle finger, I should have bought half a dozen instead of just one. I used it for many years until it finally wore through, at which point I covered it with a piece of pigskin. Pigskin is notoriously tough for all of being thin and supple, but even so, it eventually wears out with repeated abrasion. The poor thing has stood me in good stead through countless quilts and other hand-sewing projects, but when I sat down to stitch the binding around the Double Wedding Ring, I realized I was on dangerous ground. Anyone who has ever driven the threaded eye of a needle into their finger will know what I mean! I was out of instant glue, so putting another layer of pigskin over the one covering the original leather thimble was out of the question. I did the nest best thing: just poked another piece inside and jammed it in with the tip of my finger until the thimble felt snug. It's not the best solution, but it's serviceable until I can get some glue. The leather thimbles they sell these days are so big and sloppy, they'd fall off my big toe!

Mother's Not-So-Little Helper

Day 165: The bias binding for a quilt I sold finally arrived yesterday, and I was anxious to get started on finishing it. I knew better than to lay it out on the floor. Pins and pussycats are not a good combination, so I brought out a card table and laid my formica "bread board" on top of it so that I'd have enough length to pin most of one side at a time. I put the quilt on the improvised crafts table and went in the kitchen to get the pins. It took all of fifteen seconds, and this is what I found when I came back. I should have known. Merry is the only cat I've ever shared my home with who flatly refused to accept the stricture of "no cats on hard surfaces." And I know I will not win this battle, no matter how hard I try. I did manage to keep him off while I was actively pinning, and by the time I'd got to the third side, sewing each side as I went along, the novelty had worn off. He curled up in his cushy bed for a nap, satisfied that Mama didn't need help with her project after all.

Tying A Quilt

Day 150: Quilts generally consist of three layers: the top, internal batting, and a backing. Unless the three are bound together somehow, the batting has a tendency to shift and clump with repeated washings. I generally prefer to hand-quilt around the edges of each piece, but I have been known to machine-quilt occasionally, and sometimes I even tie. Hand quilting takes the longest. A quilt the size of this one would take me about a year. Machine quilting would take a week or so, but since I only have a standard sewing machine (as opposed to a long-arm quilting machine), it is very difficult to wrestle half the bulk of a quilt through the arch. Tying (also called "tufting") is by far the quickest method, and the spacing of the ties is often determined by the design. My mother and grandmother both tied their quilts, and although it is faded and stained, one of my real treasures is a Double Wedding Ring hand-quilted by my great-grandma, who we lovingly called Old-old. I have just finished tying a Double Wedding Ring I made, destined for a new home in the chilly wilds of Alaska as soon as I get the bias binding put around the edges.

Double Wedding Ring

Day 352: The Double Wedding Ring quilt top is done, and now it moves to a new spot in the queue, to wait until I am done hand-quilting the Kittygons which are currently on the frame. This is how the process goes: a rotation consisting of one on the frame, one in waiting (possibly backed and batted), one being pieced, pieces for another being cut. Currently, the cycle has two empty slots (piecing and cutting) because I need a break, folks. I need to shift onto a new activity for a while. I think I may set up a project on the floor loom. It's been empty since I finished the overshot coverlet. I measured out some warp yesterday, intending to devote today to dressing the loom. We'll see how this goes. I am still nursing a painful shoulder, so I'm not making any promises.

DWR - Two Of Five

Day 335: It came as something of a surprise when I went to attach a completed block to the second row of the Double Wedding Rng (DWR) quilt and saw that it was #4 in the string rather than #3. "Oh!" I said. "I'm done with the row!" DWR is progressing much faster than I'd anticipated, and also with fewer issues than one might expect. I had honestly thought that attaching the second row to the first would be problematic since I had had to make a few adjustments to the first two blocks of Row 1, but all the meets lined up without having to ease the fabrics and except for one short area of wobbly seaming where the sewing machine had difficulty with bulk, I didn't need to pick and re-sew. Now you can see how the rings tie into one another. Four rings wide, the finished quilt will be five rings long. I really need a better way to hang my quilts for their portraits than on shrubbery or across my garage door!

Planned Chaos

Day 329: I'm a little desperate for content, folks. I'm not getting out much these days unless it's with my botany partners or to grab groceries, but as a consequence, I'm getting a lot of sewing done. I dragged out a cork board to help with laying out the Double Wedding Ring because, believe it or not, there is a certain amount of order in the chaos. I am trying to avoid having identical prints in proximity to one another, avoiding placing any two in the same position where it would be noticeable, but I suspect there will be a few which escape my notice. And that, I say, is what makes a scrap quilt fun. I've spoken before about the games I played as a child with Old-old's DWR, but until I began putting this one together, I had forgotten one of the most compelling of my childhood searches: find the longest sequence of repeats. If memory serves, Old-old's quilt has one or two arcs where three prints appear in the same order. They are not adjacent, not placed so that they would be noticeable at a casual glance. No, they took some serious hunting for an obsessive small child to find. And here I reveal another facet of my character which I only recently labelled: I'm a discovery junkie. Whether it's plants, what's around the next bend in the trail or anything else, I'm sure Old-old's quilt played a major role in addicting me to the thrill of the find.

September Morn

Day 323: A glad, good September Morn to you, my faithful readers! A number of things have lined up to keep me from celebrating the day with my customary physical activities, not the least of which is the fact that it's probably going to be over 90 today. Consequently, I cast about for other ways to commemorate the occasion, and making the first complete ring for the Double Wedding Ring quilt hit the top of the list. Pizza was second, and I'll be picking one up later. Putting the Ring together was facilitated by the Slit 'N Sew templates which create a ring from four blocks. When quilted, the center seams will not be noticeable. I'd made four test blocks to work out any issues, but one I had not anticipated sneaked up and bit me on the bum. I hadn't really looked at the white-on-white background print as carefully as I should have done, and therefore didn't realize that the pattern was directional until I was assembling the third block. "Hang on a mo'," I said. "Something is wrong here. Some of those dashes are vertical and others are horizontal!" I only had to pick out two pieces to fix the error, and was grateful that I hadn't been farther into the project when I caught it. All in all, I think this was a pretty good way to kick off the Beautiful Month. I'll get my annual bath when the weather cools down.

At Least 1000

Day 321: I will beg your indulgence for one more post about quilting this week because, as you may have inferred, Double Wedding Ring is undoubtedly the most difficult project I've tackled yet (well, Memory Wreath wasn't easy, but at least the pieces weren't curved). The very thought of cutting out all those little wedges was daunting in itself, but it went surprisingly quickly, and I'll explain why in a minute. Here you see something in the neighbourhood of 1000 ring segments. I needed 960 for the entire project, and cut extra just to be on the safe side. These will be drawn at random from the bin in sets of 12 to assemble into two arcs of six each. After I've made 32 arcs, I will begin piecing them together with the background fabric to form the first four rings (the quilt will be four rings by five). The reason cutting the wedges went so quickly is that I was able to cut 4-6 at a time for the most part. There were a few prints I decided to "fussy-cut," i.e., center the individual piece on a part of the design. I refer to the fabrics I fussy-cut as "character prints." These include specific design elements like cats, chickens, owls, etc. which I want to feature in their entirety. Framing a character can be quite a challenge when you're cutting 2.5" pieces! The remaining segments were cut from "all-over" prints. The "all-overs" can be stacked and cut in bulk with a rotary cutter. Obviously, fussy-cutting takes more time since the template needs to be centered over a particular character. Background, "melon" and solid-colour corners will be cut as they are needed. The serious part of cutting is done and dusted, and I'm on my way to a classic.

Learning Curves - Literally

Day 320: Trust me, I knew better than to jump right into this project without working out the foibles first, but now after making four blocks from discards, I think I'm ready for the Big Time. The first block (upper left) was horrible. The meets didn't meet (a faceting term for the points at which multiple lines intersect) and the finished block was so distorted that it couldn't even be stretched to an approximation of a square. The second attempt resulted in better meets, but the block was still cattywampus. With the second block, I'd also tried an experiment to see if I could change it up to seven segments instead of six, and while it worked as planned, the outer wedges were too much reduced in size to be aesthetically pleasing. The third block buckled due to differences in how I handled the fabric, but it was more square than either of the first two. In between trials and errors, I was alternately cutting out millions of little bitty wedges and watching YouTube videos, and found several helpful suggestions. I also discovered that my sewing machine (a cheap Brother) makes it almost impossible to sew a perfect 1/4" seam if the needle is in the center position. Since the needle cannot be put on the right for some bizarre reason, the solution is to place the bulk of the fabric on the right, and shift the needle to the left so that the feed dogs both contact cloth. Sewing with the seam allowance to the left is awkward and counter-intuitive, but it allows me to align the edge on the 1/4" mark. This process plus some hints about pressing let me produce an almost perfect block on the fourth try. The term "learning curves" has taken on a whole new meaning, but I think I've got this whipped.

Inspiration

Day 310: For as long as I have been quilting, I have promised myself that someday I would make a Double Wedding Ring like the one Old-old (my great-grandmother) made for my father and mother when they married. She used flour-sack prints for the piece work and a good quality cotton for the background. I have no idea what batting she used, but it has held up well through repeated washings, and even now the quilt is in very good condition except for a stain on the back. Today, I pulled it out of storage and looked at it with a more critical eye to see how it was made. She used a machine to sew the pieces together and to apply the binding, and from the difference in length of the quilting stitches on front and back, I can tell that she used the same piercing/stabbing style of stitching that I use which, if you think about it, is only logical. She taught my grandmother, my grandmother taught me. If you detect a missing generation in there, there is a simple explanation. My mother preferred making crazy-quilts and applied decorative embroidery stitches to pieces which had been sewn directly to the background material. Currently, I have a nearly completed quilt on the frame, all but two rows of Kittygons made for another, and as soon as one or the other of those projects is done, I will begin cutting pieces for my own Double Wedding Ring, following the path Old-old put me on more than seventy years ago.