Procrastination central

The good part about putting projects off is that you often get something else done during the stretch of avoidance.

That just happened here.



A sewing machine cover! From this wonderful book, Fresh Quilting. It's the first quilting book I bought, and this is the first time I made something from it.

Now the fella can get all tucked in at night.




Hanging out on the new(old) rack.


The back.

Here's some of the process:





I promise I'll start the binding for the Seattle quilt tonight. Really. REALLY.

But, for now, here's a photo of Mr. Farmer. Our garden plot is AMAZING!

Eat it

Right now there are no fewer than 45 ideas and plans rolling around in my head. That might sound fun, but I've got actual stuff to do, and these little schemes are distracting me. I need to just eat it and get what I need to do over with.

It's also cool enough (just barely. BARELY) to run at night, so that's eating into sewing time. But quilting's feeling shouldn't be hurt, because I love running with Tom more than all other things. Really. Everyone should get to take at least one run in their life with a dog that makes this face.


He's SO happy.

So anyway. The biggest thing I'm not doing is binding this quilt. I have the binding strip half made, but I keep stalling out. I think it's because I'm intimidated by the hand-binding I have planned. Bah. Maybe I'll just machine it. Or I'll hand-bind it. And since that will take forever, what's the loss in putting it off a few more days?

I also have to sort photos from vacation and upload them to Flickr.

O! Looking at Flickr just reminded me that I have an actual quilt finish to share! A hand-bound quilt. It's wall-hanging size, but whatever. The backstory of it is here, near the end.

Please excuse the just-awful iPhone photos. I forgot to photograph this sucker until we were walking out the door to Boise. Actually walking out. Like my-real-camera-was-in-the-car-so-I-had-to-borrow-my-boyfriend's-phone degree of walking out the door.





It didn't start as a small quilt, but it ended that way after a night of me trying to quilt the damn thing and also pack for the trip to Oregon that started the next morning. A night that started at 1 a.m., when I got off work, and ended at 5 a.m. when we left for Oregon.

Things just weren't working out, and around 3 a.m. I made two decisions. One, I would make the quilt tiny and just finish the damn thing in a half-hour and two, I wouldn't try to sleep before we left. Both decisions turned out awesome, because I finished the quilting AND I ended up sleeping almost all the way to Portland. I'm awful at sitting in the car, so anytime I can sleep away a 16-hour roadtrip is a win in my book.

Anyway, this is how big it the quilt was over my dinner break the evening before we left.



Oh well.

Vacation

:: Back next week ::

Quilting done (!)

Exactly.



Binding will come on the road trip.



Maybe later I'll explain what a pain the last night of quilting this was.

I'm not ready to talk about it yet.

Actually, I'm at work. But, more later.

KBYE

Seam ripping

No words needed.

Bah

I say seam ripper, Tom says whatever.



I decided to leave the quilt as-is, got a little creative with getting enough fabric together for the backing and assembled the quilt sandwich last night after work.

I should have stopped there.

But I didn't.

I was all gung-ho about charging through this thing. To my credit, I did take the time to make a tiny sample quilt and test out the aesthetics of my proposed straight-line quilting approach. Yesterday I lamented my lack of free-motion skills, but I honestly thought the straight lines would look good here.

They looked good on the little sample. Really.

So I jumped in. And it looked OK. And then bad. And then awful. I figured that was just because it was late and I was tired. This normally happens (I think something stinks, go to bed and wake up in love with it all over).

Not this morning.

So I made the call. "Screw it," I declared to the dogs. We're going to start over.

I've never ripped quilting out of a quilt before. It sucks. It's slow.

But I am VERY glad I did.

Here's where we're at now.



These are the lines. They look awfuler in person.



I made the switch for several reasons.

1) I feel like the lines forced you to follow the motion of the quilt, instead of just letting it exist. I think this quilt top has enough motion all by itself and needs a quilting pattern that is evenly distributed. That makes sense, right?

2) There is so much piecing, and I wanted to quilt over as much of it as possible for a solid construction.

3) The strip piecing is wonky, and the lines, which I tried to keep as straight as possible, looked horribly off.

4) It looked wrinkly, and like it would not wrinkle in a nice way when washed.

I tore out one line of quilting this morning, and it look about 15 minutes. So, uh, tonight's going to be long.

First, I'm going to fix myself a gin and tonic. Then I'm going to finish zigzagging the half I started this morning.

Then it's seam ripping until my eyes cross.

A real seam ripper

@#!%&*# -- I've used all my swears on this quilt.

I'll explain why later, because I'm at work right now.

But... PHOTOS!



It's from the Block Party book! Well, sort of. I ordered the book but it hasn't arrived yet. But I couldn't wait that long to get started.

The strip off to the side is for the backing.

I have NO idea how I'll quilt it. I bought painter's tape today in anticipation of some straight-lined sumthin-sumthin.

I wish I knew how to do free-motion meandering, because that'd come in handy here. It's a skill I wish I had a lot. I've tried, but I always end up overlapping after just a few inches. Some day. But not today. That would mean more swears.

Which would be bad, because I might pull out the seam ripper again when I get home tonight.

Here's the deal: When I was piecing the last row of this guy, I thought I was short a block. But I really wasn't. Instead of a complicated explanation, I present you with this:



It's embarrassing to admit how long it took me to figure this out. Like overnight plus a few hours. I was almost out the door, fabric-store bound to buy more Kona Ash (the lighter grey) to fix the problem and THAT was when I realized it wasn't a problem.

So it all worked out. Except it made the darker blocks dominant. And I'm not so sure I like that.

The quilt on the left doesn't exist yet (thanks, Microsoft Paint. I swear I'm way better when Photoshop is available), but I think I like it more than the one that does.



Bring it, seam ripper.