I haven't blogged for quite a while but that doesn't mean that my sewing machine has been silent. I have been turning out various projects, such as more mug rugs and some other new projects like these recipe keepers:
These have been a lot of fun to make and it was also exciting to find different fabric for them. I found some fabric locally and some online on etsy.
What else have I made? I've done some bibs and burp cloths, such as these:
And I've made one fabric bookmark with a vinyl pocket (for holding a note or gift card). That's one that I've completed. I now have about a gazillion in progress. Okay maybe not literally, but it seems that way!
But what I'm most exciting about is the project that I finished today. I posted a while back about starting a quilt for my son. I got the top pieced together and the layers put together a while back. Then I started with the quilting. Since I don't have much experience with hand sewing, I decided to do the quilting on the machine. And I decided that it would be best to sew a square inside each square.
I finished one row of blocks like that. And it was one of the most miserable sewing experiences I've had. Trying to manipulate the quilt through the machine and bunching up all the extra fabric was just not fun at all. So I put it aside and decided to take a break and work on other things (see above). I finally pulled the quilt back out of the closet and stared at it. And imagined doing the squares for the rest of the quilt. And I wanted to cry because I just didn't think that I could do it.
So I decided to rip out what I had done and do something else. It felt good to take those stitches out. I decided to keep it simple and just sewed some vertical lines 1/4" on either side of the edge of each block. Understated and definitely not fancy, but it did the job. And it was something that I was able to finish without crying or cursing.
Next came the binding. I cut way more strips that needed, but that is okay. Better to have too many than not enough. I sewed the strips together and pressed it in half. Then I sewed the binding to the front of the quilt. And then I did something that I didn't think I would do at all when I started the quilt. I sewed the back of the binding on by hand. After reading through various blog instructions on finishing quilts and looking at the various techniques, I decided that hand sewing the binding really looked best overall.
And so I got started. In the past I haven't really liked hand sewing very much. My stitches are never even and the thread always gets tangled. Although that was still the case here, I actually found myself rather enjoying it and found it quite soothing. This is something that I could do more of, I thought. And so I will pursue that. I might even try my hand at hand quilting rather than machine quilting.
Sadly, I misremembered the instructions when I first started stitching. In looking back at them, I realized that I was making my stitches much too large and too noticeable. So I changed (but didn't rip back) at the point I realized it and it does look better, so I'll have to remember that in the future. Here's what I mean:
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| The more correct way with small stitches |
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| My mess up with too big stitches--oops! |
All in all, I'm quite pleased with how it turned out and I'll definitely have to do another quilt and get a bit more practice. It was a lot of fun and I'm already thinking about what I might try to do next. But until then, here are some pictures of the finished quilt:
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| The back |
Oh, so I found myself with a problem that I remember having even when I used to cross stitch: getting knots in the thread while I was pulling it through the fabric. Very frustrating. I had planned to do a google search and try to find out if there were any tricks to keep that from happening. And surprisingly, in my Google Reader today, one of the blogs I follow posted about this exact issue and provided some tips to keep the thread from tangling. What great timing!
