Ripping Again
Before I begin, let me first say that I appreciate everyone who takes the time to leave a real comment. I don't appreciate spam comments and generally remove the worst offenders, but I did receive one this week on my PEX plumbing post that I thought was absolutely hilarious. Here is a word for word quote from one John Smith, minus the spam link: "Extremely pleasant article, I appreciated perusing your post, exceptionally decent share, I need to twit this to my adherents. Much appreciated!." Twit this to my adherents? I laugh every time I think about this!!
Anyway, without further ado, let's get started.
Do you work on just one project start to finish or jump around? I always have more than one project going. Some days I just can't face working on a project, or I'm frustrated and need to let it sit a bit until I'm calm about it. Sometimes projects are just boring and working on something else at the same time breaks up the tedium.
So. Here's what's going on in my sewing room at the moment. I am participating in Kate Basti's Summertime Book Club QAL. For this one you decide what your finished project will look like and just post progress photos on Instagram to match each week's task. While I did purchase about 25% of the fabric for this project, I'm trying hard to do most out of what I already had. Here are my book fabric selections.
Isn't this cat fabric the best? It has serious glow-in-the-dark power too.
Here are the books I've made so far.
I thought it would be great to let the long arm quilt something while I am working on the books. This Fat Quarter Shop BOM from 2013 seemed like a good choice. It's been folded up waiting for quilting for a few years. When I laid it out to measure for the backing it looked pretty bumpy and wavy. I told myself it was just from being folded up for so long, but I knew. I knew that I had not properly applied the borders because I had sewn it at a retreat and didn't take the time to do it right.
When I measured, one long side was over an inch longer than the other. I knew there was a lot of seam ripping in my future. I ripped off the outer borders--though the picture doesn't show it all, this quilt has four sets of borders. Still way off. I paid my son a dollar per border piece to remove the rest. Totally worth the $12 I gave him.
I have started reapplying the borders using the correct measurement process. Click here for a free download on how to properly apply borders. I actually think that the inner pieced sashing strips are a bit off too, but I don't like the quilt enough to put that much more effort into it. Here's the trimmings from the first two sets of borders. Quite a bit of variation. You can see how the quilt got to be so out of square.
I am now reapplying the pieced borders. The first one went right on, fitting exactly right. The second one is way too big. In this case, because there is too much to ease in, the way to fix this is to make some of the seams a little smaller so that the piece is the correct length. This is the point where I got really frustrated and called it a day. However, because I already have the backing loaded on the long arm, I need to keep at it and get this done so that I can move on to quilting other things.
I'm working on one more project at the moment. If you've been reading along lately, you'll recall that I made a few Quilts for Kids quilts. This is a great way to try out a new quilting design or just do a quick project that has a great purpose. Anyway, years ago (like 20 years ago!) I received a bunch of fabrics to make a bug jar quilt. I never did make the quilt, but still had all these pieces. Quilts for Kids has a pattern for an I Spy quilt that I am modifying to accommodate having all the rectangles be different prints. There were enough of these bug jar pieces to make two separate quilts. I did have to trim them down slightly, but it's worth it to use up something from my stash. My plan is to make a bigger effort to use what I have rather than buying new.
Finally, I still have three quilts that need binding. One is the 365 Challenge. One is this Coral Queen of the Sea. It's a huge quilt and I have about half of one side left to do.
The last is this little Charming Lucy baby quilt that I talked about last week.
In garden news, we had our first lettuce harvest. The lettuce is really struggling this year and isn't as tender as it's been in years past. There is still some bok choy left. My husband harvested like three strawberries this year and they look like they are done now. The potatoes are growing like crazy. Hopefully we'll get a better harvest from those than we did last year. The green beans are coming along and starting to blossom. I have harvested 9 sugar snap peas so far. They are delicious. Those are a first time growing this year and I will for sure plant them again. We are also growing some beets. They look like they are finally starting to grow well. We have one "Coolapeno" jalapeño plant and it looks great. The lone cucumber plant is starting to get HUGE and has quite a few blossoms. Do you grow any of your own food?
Thanks for sharing your ripping events. Does your son make house calls? And why hasn't someone invented a ripper that can tell the difference between thread and cloth? Just ordered the Book pattern, like I needed another project but.... We also quilt for kids and dogs. Someone asked why I made them pretty - they're for dogs. Well the humans have to look at them. And great practice. Sorry about the tree. The new ones will look very nice.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure he'd be happy to make house calls if he got paid! Thanks for stopping by.
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