I wanted to share with you the 12 lovely new fat quarters that came in the mail today…Oooo, I just can’t wait to figure out what I’m going to do with these!
I flipped the stack upside down to give you another angle…I just can’t figure out which one I love best!
I also had the bright idea that I needed a thread catcher and after drooling over way too many options on Pinterest I picked one, which has a pin cushion attached, and set off making it tonight. I succeeded, although I think I made it harder than it needed to be!
The pattern I chose to follow suggested adding boning to the top of the bag to keep it open; since I didn’t have any of that I decided to use fusible interfacing on the bag liner to make it stand up. That did the trick but sewing through the interfacing and trying to turn it inside out was a bit of a struggle. I fought the bag and I won! Here are a few pics of the finished object – now I’m off to bed – g’nite!
I know I could’ve done a better job of finishing the end…after a good night’s rest I’ll tackle that tomorrow!
I’ve been plugging away a little each day on the Crossword Puzzle quilt and I’ve got the top all done – woohoo! Now comes the ‘scary part’ (for me anyway) I need to lay out the backing fabric, line up the batting and then line up the top – with no wrinkles! Here’s where my OCD will either be a help or a hindrance :-s
First I needed to make sure that I had enough backing fabric to cover with several inches of allowance on all sides and that’s where I hit my first snag 😦 I clearly didn’t measure correctly when I cut the backing fabric and I only had enough allowance on the sides and not the top and bottom – ugh! Ok, so this is my first quilt I guess those kind of mistakes are allowed 😉 Luckily I had a 4″ strip left over when I was cutting for the additional border so I added it to the top (you can see how it’s short on the upper right corner) – clearly not perfect but I guess I’m going to go with it anyway.
This picture was taken with my ‘real’ camera. It had just enough battery left to snap this shot.
I need to press both the top and backing, mark the center of each and then take a shot at layering them with the batting (fingers crossed!). I’ll try to snap some shots of that process – I’m sure it will be hilarious!!
I had the itch to sew something else and I had read/heard that I should test quilting with the fabrics before I actually start on my main project so I thought I’d try making a mug rug. I had a left over 5″ charm in white and a piece of backing fabric 2″x40 so I used the ‘quilt as you go’ method. My machine had no problems going through the fabric + batting so that was a relief and since I plan to quilt using straight lines I think I’m good. The binding is another story! I watched several YouTube videos before starting but I still had horrible results…I attached the binding to the back and then tried to machine stitch it to the front – not pretty! Me thinks I may attach the binding to the front of my Crossword Quilt and hand stitch it on the back…we’ll see.
And last but not least, I found it hard to keep track of all the pins I was using to try to keep my seams straight so I used a few scraps of backing fabric to make myself a pin cushion. I didn’t bother with making the closure look professional, after all it’s just going to sit in my sewing room. I had some long grain rice I used that as my filling…it works great!
Sew Quilty Good 