Monday, April 9, 2012

Quilting

     Quilting is not an easy or cheap project. In fact, it it pretty hard and kind of expensive. But, here is the story from the beginning:
      I finally screwed up the courage to start on a quilt. So i went to the closest place to get fabric- Walmart. Tsk-tsk if you like, but fabric is fabric and I can't afford the Greenhills fabric store just yet. Plus, I didn't want to spend a ton on something I'm just learning and am likely to screw up. So I bought pre-cut fabric squares (remember I still work over 40 hours a week. No time for square cutting) a bunch of muslin for the back and batting. All in all about $60. Not bad, but the story doesn't end there.
     After watching countless hours of how-to quilt on youtube I took the first step. I organized my quilting squares in a pattern. Sure, it is just a square by square pattern. None of the fancy pinwheels or log cabins or modern log cabin (which has a loft and all two car garage unlike the regular log cabin). I stitched and stitched and stitched on my teeny machine. It took me two days of after work work to finish it. It was not hard, but my thread kept breaking and would snap out of the guide holes. Then I'd have to re-thread the whole thing and start again. Boo.
     Here's the real heartbreaker- the reason it kept breaking is that my needle bent. Eventually it became so bent that the whole thing would seize up and I couldn't work. I then went on the quest to find a new needle.  I looked all over the guidebook and machine and needle and everywhere for the needle number that would tell me the size of the replacement needle. Nope. No where. After buying and trying five different sizes of needle ($15) I gave up. So I waited until the next month (march) so I could afford a new machine.  I decided on a medium grade model ($80).
     Having everything in place, I went on to the next step of a quilt sandwich and batting. Sounds better than it is. It involves putting a ton of pins in the quilt sandwich to hold it together while quilting. That done, I moved on to quilting. FAIL. Not having the proper quilting foot for the machine ($8) that would allow me to create a neat quilt pattern, I decided to "stitch in the ditch" which mean to sew where there are already seems. Easy enough? Wrong.
     Being that not all my seams are completely straight, it led to some craziness. It would have been ok on the top. You can't see the mess of stitches because of the pattern in the fabric. On the back, however, you can clearly see. It looks like I was quilting drunk. it dos not help that I chose to do it all in black to match the top which contrasts with the white bottom. A poor decision on my part.
     I got all ready to do the binding, but have not yet. I am seriously considering ripping out all my quilting seams and trying again so it's not so much of a mess. It takes 1/4 the time to undo as it does to do. I will update with how it goes and with photos.

Do you remember me? The Blogger?

     I have let this blog completely go, haven't I? I really really didn't mean to. It started because nothing seemed to be getting done. The paintings. The quilting. I wasn't learning anything new. Why blog is nothing is going on?
     Then the opposite happened. There was an explosion of creativity. I have since created five new paintings with another on the way and have gotten down to the last steps of a quilt. I will give you a post about each. Pictures come later when I am not on a work break.