2012 August 05

Recently I saw a helpful hint that I wanted to share – how to keep your blocks in the correct order when you take them from the design wall to the sewing machine – no matter how careful I am at this sometimes I get them facing the wrong way or out of order.

I saw the following hint on Tim Latimer -Quilts Ect. –Tim is from Michigan and has a quilt accepted for the upcoming Michigan AQS show – congratulations to you Tim! I hope you get a ribbon. Tim is also is a contributor to the Celebrate Hand Quilting blog as I am.

Anyhow to get back to the helpful hint that I saw on Tim’s blog – masking tape! We use it for so many things, marking quarter inches on our sewing machines, tape for seam lines, tape for quilting lines – why not holding the row together so it doesn’t get out of order?

Here I have my row already on the design wall – now I need to get it to my sewing machine in the correct order – but I have a small sewing room – no room for a design wall – I need to get this row to the next room and not loose track of the order. If I stack it up I sometimes still make a mistake. Simple – pull out a long piece of tape and gently stick it to your row.

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A bigger photo of the row:

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Gently take the row to your sewing machine – I have a small area to sew in so I put up a small fold out table near me and place the row carefully on the table. Starting from one side I remove one piece at a time and sew. I haven’t messed up yet and I have been using this method since I started.

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I have 2-X’s that I want to move before I get to anymore sewing – as I see the X in the 5th row 3rd from the left that I don’t like there – I am going to move the blue one next to it in that spot and the red print where the blue is. Other than that I think this is the set up.

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Hope your weekend is going smoothly. We are slightly cooler than we had been and have first now at 12:46 reached 91 degrees and it is cloudy! Rain later maybe? Who knows. There have been a few days over the past month when it was 91 already at 10 AM.

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Well piecing began yesterday and after a short while I realized I had made a mistake in cutting! Wow – I tell you I measure two or three times before I cut I don’t know how I screwed up! All is well though, I was able to pull some fabric off the shelves to mix in with what I had and have enough pieces. I did make sure to cut all the mistake pieces into scrap sizes to put in the boxes and have been trying to keep up with that – I still have that big basket to work on but there you go – one day.

I don’t have a name for this quilt at this point – it will come to me at some point while I am making it. I put the design wall up in the dinning area and I’m going back and forth from there to the sewing machine. So far I go to the yellow area on the top side – that is where I found a mistake and from there stopped sewing and got back to cutting! The rectangle piece is one of the ones that was wrong – a total of 9 that got messed up because I had stacked layers and cut wrong Sad smile

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This is what I have on the design wall so far – more to go of course. These really aren’t colors I normally work with so this is something new.

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Something else out of the comfort zone – the bundle package of fabric that I won arrived yesterday– a lot darker than I thought they were!! I haven’t a clue right now what I will make with this – they are fat eights – 40 of them – would you say these are Civil War colors? Revolutionary War? These might look good in that Feathered Star pattern that I showed a couple days ago – hmm – will have to think on it for sure. I will get it bundled back up and put on the shelf for me to look at and think awhile.

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While I was cooling off from being angry over my cutting mistake I picked up the applique and got a little stitching done – I always find it wise to leave a project I have trouble on for a cooling off period or sometimes more mistakes are made Smile This is at the start of the 3rd border – moving right along!