October 31, 2012

Stitch Up

Happy Halloween!

If you're reading from the east coast of the US, I hope you and yours are safe and sound.

As I've said in the last few posts, it's getting cold out there.  A benefit of hand-quilting is that my legs stay toasty while I'm working.

But let's get to the photos.  (Apologies for quality, I'm using a different camera and we are still negotiating our relationship.)



It took hours to mark up the big swaths of colour.  Lots of measuring.  Ugh.  I didn't use anything fancy for the marking, just a ruler and pencil.  The marks may turn out to be permanent but let's hope not.

Once the marking was done, it was time to half-sandwich.  I mentioned last week that the back and front are getting different treatments.  There may be a better way to achieve this effect but I am doing it by only creating one side of the sandwich at a time.

As I didn't start with a final measurement for this quilt, it turned out to be an abnormal size, so I had to order too much wadding and cut it down.


I attempted to fold the wadding in half and make it nice and fluffy, but there just wasn't enough.  So one layer it is.  Our new house is twice the size of our flat former flat but I still had to roll up the carpet.  Some things never change.

Pinning took ages.  After reading a quilting memoir, I made sure to order a gross of pins.  I used half.



Nothing left to do but start stitching 

I had purchased an embroidery hoop long ago for just this purpose.  I didn't use it.  I found it just got in the way.


I'm using embroidery floss here and just a regular needle with a larger eye.  I broke too threaders in the course of three hours of quilting. I kept using them but they are just little twisted bits of wire at this point.  To be honest  threading the needle took longer than stitching a row.

It's just a basic running stitch, nothing fancy.




It definitely creates more interest on the back panel.  I'm not having any great epiphanies, but it's satisfying.

It feels like stitching a sweatshirt and it can get a bit clunky trying to stitch near the center, a lot of fabric to gather up in one hand.  An embroidery hoop probably would help there but I seem to be doing okay without it and I think constantly readjusting the hoop would get old, fast.

1 comment:

  1. You're doing so well! I love the chevrons. Are you going to outline some of the graphics, like the elephants?

    I also decided to forgo the hoop because it got in the way! And threading the needle was a pain in the ass. I didn't use a threader, but I did use all six strands. In the future, I think four would be enough.

    Yay!

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