Little Island Quilting: February 2010

Sunday, 28 February 2010

String quilt part II

Managed to reduce the contents of my scrap basket by adding a border...

...and made some more blocks for the back which helped nicely as the backing fabric was not wide enough. Still wasn't quite wide enough after I'd added the additional blocks so an old Jinny Beyer border fabric came to the rescue either side of the blocks. Quilted in straight lines with a walking foot.

And here is the end result...

...not bad (though I say it myself) for someone who got an 'ungraded' in Needlework 'O' Level ;-)

Sunday, 21 February 2010

Lessons learnt from making a string quilt

That it is not OK if you forget to reduce your stitch length when it comes time to tear away the paper backing
That the glue used to hold the first strip in place should be used sparingly and not slathered on like there is no tomorrow. Because there will be a tomorrow and it'll be one in which it will take forever to get every last scrap of paper off the glued first strip
That blocks get made quicker listening to this....particularly like the intro to the first song

That there are no such things as ugly fabrics when it comes to string quilts...especially not cows wearing Santa hats

That no matter how hard you try to make sure that all your fabrics look randomly placed...you'll still end up sewing two identical ones right next to each other

That it seems alarmingly bubbled and it's going to have to have the life quilted out of it before it looks flat(ish)

That even just one small section of the quilt holds a mass of memories - dresses made, fabric shops visited, late-night internet orders, surprise scrap bags bought (hence the cows with Santa hats on...you didn't really think I'd have knowingly bought it did you?), bags made, quilts for babies, growing children.

That whoever said string quilts were a good way to use up scraps was not telling the truth...

Click on the quilt for a larger view

Excellent tutorial was from here.

Tuesday, 16 February 2010

Take one jelly roll and one charm pack

Cut them up and sew them back together...

But it's not all plain sailing because while machine quilting, the top thread keeps breaking and despite continually flattening out the spray basted quilt, some puckering has occured. This is the less than perfect quilt back where you can see where I've had some stitch bunching at the back.

I tried everything - adjusting the tension, changing the needle, going slower, thinking nice thoughts and nothing worked. I have the same thread in the top and in the bobbin. I have a Bernina with the BSR and if I'm honest, it doesn't keep even stitches. I start off with all good intentions of doing some nice straight line quilting and then woosh, foot hits the pedal and I'm off at the controls of what feels like an out-of-control lawnmower and in this case, a top thread that kept breaking. Anyone else had this problem, or even better, anyone have the solution?