After I bought a new ottoman to sit on when sewing, I decided to make a rug to go with it. Now I decided that it's going to be a wall hanging instead, and I have two good reasons for my decision.
First, it looked kind of puny on the floor (even though it's roughly 2 feet by 4 feet), but made a huge impact when I held it up against my sewing room wall.
And second - look at how wavy it was when I thought I was done quilting. Wowza.
I quilted the borders first. Believe me, they used to be nice and flat...
... until I free motioned this center block. You can't see the stitching, but 99% of all these lines and curves are quilted. It's not that I like free motion quilting - I dislike it very much. But I didn't want to do straight line quilting all over this boisterous pattern.
So I went back to the borders and added lines and lines and lines of stitching until I was so bored that I decided it was enough.
Incidentally, this is a good shot of the edge that shows what a pillowcase binding looks like. No skinny little binding, just a continuous flow of the top right out to the edge, like one of those infinity pools.
Here's the front now that I'm finished. You can see it still has a little wiggle going on. Put that on the floor and it's a candidate for tripping.
When I was auditioning borders for this project, I thought I was going to use the same fabrics on the top and bottom borders. The fabrics in the top horizontal borders are what I chose. But then I thought it would be more interesting to have different ones on the other end, because sometimes you just can't have enough busyness going on.
Now that it's a wall hanging, I can either hang it this way, with the orange on the top...
... or this way with the orange on the bottom. I like it this way better. I think.
Here's the back. I chose these fabrics back when I thought this would be a reversible rug. I could use it as a reversible wall hanging, but the bobbin work of my free motion stitching leaves a little something to be desired.
I still need to add a sleeve and a label, but I wanted to show this to you today. I think I'll put a sleeve on each end, in case I change my mind on which direction is up. I seem to do that a lot.
Cute plant stake I found at a dollar store the other day. Not much chance of the whirligig part of it spinning since I have it in the house.
I used the pillowcase binding technique for my quilt rug. I thought it would look more like a rug if it didn't have a traditional binding on the edges.
This is the first time I've done this on a project this large. I didn't want too much shifting when turning the thing inside out, so I stitched in the ditch to attach the top to the batting. (I described that process in I Have a New Foot.) Then I sewed 1/4" away from the edges and trimmed it all up, nice and square.
I laid this "half sandwich" on top of the backing, right sides of the fabric together. Now I have a full sandwich. Here you see pin basting along the edges.
I attached all the layers using a 1/4" seam allowance. I had heard that if you start and stop with a right angle, that makes a nice crisp corner that stays put after you turn. Plus it's supposed to make it easy to fold in that 1/4" seam allowance on the opening slit.
It sounded good to me, so I did it. Here's a photo before trimming away the backing.
I left a huge opening on one end, so there wouldn't be much stress on the edges of the opening. That can be a messy part if you're not careful, but I wasn't too worried because after all, I did that fail-safe right angle stitching.
Well doggone it if that right angle stitching didn't rip right out. That was disappointing. I went back and secured the beginning and ending points with a locking stitch. Or I could have done a back stitch, but since I rarely do that, I usually wind up pressing the wrong button.
Here it is, turned inside out.
I didn't want my edges to roll; I wanted them to align exactly. So I used a pointy tool and ran it along the seam line from the inside to push all the bulk out. Then I finger pressed the seam to make sure the top and bottom edges were nice and even. Lastly, I pressed it with the iron to make a sharp edge and turned in a nice even 1/4" seam allowance where the opening was.
I finished it off with top stitching along the edges, and now I'm quilting it.
When it warms up, I'm going to do some painting. I want to do the painting outside, and it's snowing right now.
I bought this table over the weekend, at the same garage sale where I bought my red dress form. It's beat up, so I don't feel guilty about painting it.
This corner needs some wood glue.
This corner can't be patched, at least with my skill set. But once covered with paint, it will fall into the "has character" category.
As you can see, the top is awful. I love painted furniture but don't have very much of it. I'm almost giddy with the potential of this.
Aside from the weather, the only thing holding me back is deciding on a paint color. I've narrowed it to green, yellow, or pink.
- Green is my favorite color, particularly something in the chartreuse range. That color works well with hot and spicy fuchsia and orange, as well as cool blues and greens.
- Butter yellow is so pretty and cheerful and it goes well with any color in the world.
- If I did pink, it would a saturated, vivid pink, like the ottoman in my sewing room. That color is the least flexible, but the most fun.
Next time you see this table, it'll look totally different.
I don't go to many garage sales these days, because I've gone to too many that didn't pan out. So I was thrilled last Friday to be driving down the street on my regular route and saw a garage sale up ahead. It made sense to glance over there, and my eyes about popped out of my head when I saw a large red dress form.
I did a quick U-turn and walked up for a closer look, followed by an immediate grab. It's 29" tall, 13" wide, and a fantastic addition to my sewing room.
Why can't all garage sales be this good?
When I first started to quilt, I thought that stitching in the ditch was a beginner's stitch, and therefore easy. It must be, I reasoned, since all the books recommended that you start your quilting process with this technique, in order to stabilize your layers.
I've never been very good at stitching in the ditch, and over the years I just abandoned it. That is, until one of my fellow quilt guild members told us about a stitch-in-the-ditch foot.
Excited to finally have the perfect helper, I bought one. It looked foolproof, with that knife-sharp guide riding in the ditch. Off I went, merrily sewing along on my quilt rug.
When I checked my work, this is what I found. Not in the ditch at all.
After grumbling to myself about the foot, I applied a little logic to the problem. It looked like my needle wasn't centered behind that "prow" thing sticking out on the front of the foot. Hoping for a way to control the needle position, I consulted the manual. Sure enough, my old machine does have the ability to move the needle. Now that I think about it, I barely remember reading about it years ago, but I was certain I had never adjusted my needle position, at least not intentionally.
Here's where the problem was: I have a slider bar that has a dual function, depending on what type of stitch you're doing. I didn't know that. When you're in stitch type 1 (straight stitch) and move the slider bar, you control the variable needle position. When you're in stitch type 3 (zigzag), the very same slider bar controls the width of the zigzag. So some time in the past, I screwed things up without realizing it. This would also explain why my 1/4" seams weren't very accurate.
Lesson learned.
I put the needle back where it was supposed to be and tried again. Although it looks pretty good right here in this section - look at the seam between the orange and black - I found that this new foot certainly wasn't foolproof. There are other spots where my stitching climbed out of the ditch, then went back in for awhile, then climbed out, etc.; you get the picture.
That was disappointing. At this time I must attribute it to operator error. A few days later I tried to stitch in the ditch without my new foot, just going nice and slow, and I had good results. Not perfect, but good, and better than when using the foot. I think the trick is you have to watch where your needle is coming down, not a spot in front of it like when you keep your eyes on the guide.
For all the effort it takes, I think I'm just going to go back to top-stitching along a seam line, unless it's a piece where I'm doing free-motion quilting.
The other thing I tried new was tying off the beginning threads by pulling the top thread to the back. It made a nice invisible finish on the top. Just leave a long tail when you start sewing so you have enough to thread through a needle.
Then pull it through to the back and make a double knot.
I'm not sure how often in the future I'll do either of these techniques, but it was a fun learning experience.
Yesterday I showed you my new ottoman I use as a stool in front of my sewing machine. That color was so punchy that I wished I had a correspondingly lively rug to go with it. Seems like every time I go to a store I check out their rugs, but I rarely see something that really hits my spot.
All I'm looking for is a smallish rug, maybe 2' x 4'. Sometimes I'll throw a quilt on the floor and call it a rug. This time I decided why not consciously make a quilt rug from the get-go?
This is my idea of a rug! I knew fairly early on that I was going to use this big floral in the center, along with the borders you see here. But I wasn't sure what fabrics I wanted to use to build out the rest of the rug.
So I laid fabric combinations on the floor to audition them (my design wall is filled with another project). I took pictures of all the options so I could go back and pick the one I
liked the best. Let's look at them, along with my reactions. You
probably have your own opinion on which one you like the best.
There will be only three fabrics, all in the lower left, that change in these photographs.
I like these three very much, but their scale is too similar.
I swapped out the grey on the left. This grey has a different scale, but I feel like there's too much pink going on.
Orange is nice; this isn't too bad but maybe I can find something I'll like even better.
I'm not really a stripe person, but let's see if I can make it work. Hmm, I don't really like it with the orange.
OK, let's get rid of the orange and try that grey squiggle again. I like it and the green, but I'm still not feeling the stripes.
Maybe if I move the stripe to an inner, narrower border and add a pink fabric. Now there's not enough contrast in value.
I brought back the dark grey that I started with. I love grey. And I love chartreuse, because that's stayed the middle border in all of my options. No matter how hard I try, I just can't make that stripe work. I like orange!! Where's that orange I tried earlier?
Ah, that feels just right. This is what I'm going with. Good thing I took all the pictures to make my decision-making process more efficient and logical.
If you are looking at the photograph closely and notice a little of the grey squiggle fabric above the dark grey, you can ignore it. When I was throwing the fabric down for auditions, sometimes I just laid new fabrics on top, instead of removing them, because I was lazy. It won't be part of the finished quilt rug.
