The Hawaiian quilt is coming along. I have made it through several nerve-wracking steps. As I get further along, the stakes for messing up get higher. The progress to date now represents hours of precious time. I constantly have to remind myself to just keep going, that if it gets messed up, SO WHAT! Every success, but more importantly, every failure is a learning opportunity.
It took a few tries to figure out how to cut away the turtles shell pieces after the main body was all sewn down.
The quilting kit instructions were basically incomprehensible on how to cut out the little pieces before any quilting was actually holding things together and appeared to be written for hand applique. I am simply against hand sewing on principle, I mean this is the whole reason sewing machines were invented anyway, to free us from the tedium of hand sewing. So, left to my own devices to make this work for machine sewing, I first copied the pattern and traced over it again, eliminating the seam allowances.
then I tried copying the design onto water-soluble
Solvy (looks sort of like Sarah Wrap), and free motion sewing over the cut lines onto the turtle. This turned out terrible, the
Solvy just didn't have enough body to stay exactly in place and the stitch lines distorted everything as I was sewing.
Note: just now in my quest to find the hyperlink to Solvy I actually read the directions for use, which suggested putting everything in an embroidery hoop, maybe next time.
Next, I created a little template, sort of a reverse stencil, of what would be the cut out portions, laid this over each turtle and traced with a chalk pencil.
and now for one of the "not for sissies" parts, actual cutting. Slowly, slowly, ever so carefully feeling underneath the fabric to make sure I wasn't going all the way through and thus make a BIG HOLE in my lovely work, of much lesser concern in my concentration was taking care not to cut off my own fingertip as I gripped the fabric, but couldn't see through the fabric to exactly where my finger was in relation to the scissors.
Whew, made it through with the quilting backing AND all my fingers intact.
And now onto the basting step, I just love this
Quilting Basting Gun from Dritz, it puts little plastic T-bar tacks through the fabric, very similar to how store tags are attached. This is a real time saver over putting in safety pins or heaven forbid, hand basting.
there is a small drawback to this unit, the tip of the gun is a rather large, hollow needle and to properly set the tag you have to really press the whole fabric sandwich (top fabric, batting and backing fabric) up against the nose of the gun or you get misfires. Misfires are no big deal, you just clear the jam and keep going, but it's a waste of tacks and time, so it pays to be careful to really press the fabric up to the nose of the gun from the bottom.
Yet another operation that involves sharp objects above and invisible fingers below. This time my finger didn't remain unscathed, and in true hobbyist fashion my first thought was "oh no, I hope I didn't get any blood on the fabric". Luckily, no blood stains and only a really minor injury, but this proves my point that sewing isn't for sissies.
