I'd Rather Be Flying (IRBF) - Inspriation

While travelling on holiday last year, I picked up a printed panel of an airport in a shop near Harden NSW. The panel has now inspired a collection of aviation fabrics and notions. I’ve got some initial ideas on how to combine these, but am busy with other projects and deciding on the style I want for this aviation theme quilt “I’d Rather Be Flying”.

You’ll notice in the photos that I have the fabrics pinned to a ‘design wall’. While this sounds fancy, all it is, is some heavy duty cardboard (about 1m x 1.2m) with thin wadding staple-gunned onto it. I’ve added a rod on the back that’s hanging on a couple of picture hooks. It’s a pretty simple, hide-able arrangement. At the moment mine stays on the wall because I have space but it’s previously lived behind desks and only been pulled out when I needed it. I find this a very useful addition to my collection – it’s saved me lots of sewing things together that wouldn’t have ended up looking right. So when you read in a book or magazine or elsewhere on the web about the virtues of a design wall, you’ll know it needn’t be as fancy as it sounds, but that it’s a handy bit of kit to have/make.

I’ll continue musing, but in the meantime you can help me and others who may have purchased these panels by providing us with some inspiration… post a comment or email your ideas on what the quilt could be like or a story you’d like to share. You never know, it might just be the missing link!

BERT

PS: The cockpit instrument panel is a separate printed panel I picked up somewhere else - it just aligns nicely with the runway on the airport panel.

FG2 – Appliqué Do-s and Don’ts

Mum’s been madly sewing flowers onto the background this week so I’ve got a pile of emails from her I thought I’d summarise here for you. Although Mum’s sewing machine has been “chinese water torture” to work with a lot of the week, it looks like she’s prevailed in the end. The photos below show you the progress on the ‘Fantasy Garden’ quilt and I’ve added some dos and don’ts from what we’ve learned/relearned about appliqué in the process.

Do’s
Do a practice piece first – this makes sure problems are identified early and happen (mostly) on the practice piece rather than your best work. This is especially handy for: *getting corners and tight curves right as these can be tricky this allow you to get the idea of how to do these before you do the final ones; *testing threads and decorative stitches; *trying and refining new techniques; and*getting the stitch widths, lengths and combinations right.

If threads are being a problem (catching, not moving through the machine, just not producing nice stitches etc.) try:

• rethreading the machine,
• adjusting the tension,
• different brands or types of threads,
• adding some interfacing or stabilizer (e.g. freezer paper) to reinforce the fabric or make it easier to slide across the machine.

Don’ts
Don't use the cheap fabric for the background – fabric with a low thread count is too thin, pulls through, doesn’t sit flat and generally doesn’t look nice. If you have to use this type of fabric, add some iron-on interfacing (med-heavy weight) to the back of the panel to reinforce it – freezer paper just isn’t sturdy enough for this.

Don't place the sewing lines for the appliqué pieces where seams cross on the background (as occurs in the purple B flowers on this design shown in the photo).

Other Ideas
If working with a large background piece (this one is about 1.2m x 1.5m), try making the background in two (or multiple) sections, applique-ing all the pieces on (except those that cross the centre seam), then add the final seam and remaining appliqués. This should make the movement of the pieces easier “so your not drowning in fabric as you try & navigate the curves”.

That's it from me for today - I've got some experimenting with cutting curves and bias tape to do ;-)

BERT

LRT5 - Trimming and Borders

I find cutting a large pieced section a bit of a nerve racking experience, but I’ve braved it today and it worked, so I thought I’d share with you how to make trimming and borders more successful. As I learned a when I made a large log cabin block a few years ago, the key thing is to trim the panel to be square regularly, because if you leave the trimming to the end, the compound error is large and it’s hard to make it look nice and square. For LRT, I also have the challenge of the squares not really being square (refer to LRT4 post).


To get the panel so it both looks square and is square, I first folded the panel in half vertically and pinned the first and last seams together so the strips would align, and then aligned that fold with the grid on my cutting board, and cut through the layers so the left and right sides of the panel were parallel. I then folded the panel in half again, aligning the top and bottom edges of the earlier fold, as well as the cut edges on the cutting grid, and trimmed the remaining layers so both the corners were square, and the top and bottom edges parallel.


So next was to add the top and bottom strips to create a leafy border all the way around the pieced strips…I’d made the 6 1/2'’ strips of leafy fabric last weekend, so before cutting these to size I had a helper help me measure the vertical height, the horizontal width, and the diagonals of the panel in a few places to confirm it was square, trimmed the top and bottom strips to the same size the selected size of the horizontal strips and sewed them on to the panel. Note, whenever you add a border to a block or panel, measure it as I’ve described above and cut the border strips to the average size of the length or width of the panel. This allows you to fudge it by slightly stretching or condensing the panel to match the strip size. This may sound like a strange thing to do, but this way you make the panel a consistent size and shape rather than adding more layers of errors to sort out when you get to squaring up the completed quilt top.


To do that fudging when adding strips to a square or rectangle, pin both corners of the strip to the panel it’s joined to (as shown in the photo). Do this at both ends of the strip (plus a few pins in between if it’s a long seam) and then loosen or tighten the pieced panel to fit the strip as you sew the seam to make the length match the strip. Presuming both pieces were cut square, this gives you a near-perfect corner when you open the seam out. Then you can just check how square and straight the corners and edges are, trim a little if necessary and carry on with the next section of your quilt. What you end up with might be something like my panel with the border added shown here.

Another fudging tip while I think of it…WARNING!: if you’re a card carrying member of the quilting police then skip on to the next paragraph as this fix may cause you mental harm, otherwise read on…one piece in a joined set that’s very close to the sewing line of seam can be a problem, in a finished quilt it may become exposed with washing, wear and tear etc. Most of my quilts so far has had one of these pesky sections so the best ways I’ve found to deal with it are to: 1) shorten the section so that it’s not an issue, or 2) if the first option will spoil the effect, then sew the seam close to the edge, but then secure that section with a couple more rows of stitching as shown in the photos below. This makes it more difficult for the edges to escape and should stop any fuzziness appearing on the outside of the quilt.

I’ve also done some experimenting for the next border on ‘Life’s Rich Tapestry” this afternoon – I’ll write another post about that shortly ‘cause it was lots of fun.


BERT

Fantasy Garden (FG1) - An experiment

Quilting seems to have been a sociable craft from it’s early days, and although I learned to quilt from friends, I’d never worked on a project with other people before. That’s all over now….Recently, inspired by an article in a magazine, some funky fabric in my stash, the desire to get my Mum back into sewing, and learn more about appliqué, Mum and I embarked on a project together.

The quilt is called ‘Fantasy Garden’ and has a pieced background, with the remainder of the design appliquéd on using the ‘stick it on’ and the freezer paper method. We’ve chosen bright fabrics because that’s what we like and it will brighten up a dark corner in the house.

I’ve told the first chapter of the story in pictures for you (below) and we’ll share the fun with you as we go. From piles of fabric to having the flowers stuck on the background took a support crew, a lot of tea, and about 3 days work. I suspect we’ll get better at this as we go along, but it’s fun to share the creative challenge with someone else.

Have you done a project like this? You could tell us about it with a comment by clicking on the link below. We’d love to hear your stories!

BERT

LRT4 Squares ain’t Squares – A lesson in fudging it

I spent Sunday converting my strips of pieces, to a nice rectangle. Sounds easy doesn’t it? Hmmm. My plan with this quilt was to keep the patchwork design simple so that it would be easy to put together and I could make a feature of the quilting. The problem with achieving this first arose when I noticed that the charm squares I had bought (to save me some cutting), were parallelograms, not squares. So, when I strip pieced the squares and rectangles together (refer to my LRT3 post) I lined up all the pieces on the left hand side so I could just trim the right hand edge and would have a nice neat strip. Problem with this was that the pieced strips ended up being wobbly anyway, so I’ve spent a couple of hours figuring out what to do about it.


My first attempt at straightening the pieced strips I tried as planned, only it ended up a banana shape instead of a neat long rectangle and bent the straight leaf strip I joined it too as well (as shown in the photo).

Doh!!

I unpicked the join and started again. Next, I tried just laying the strip out on my cutting board, aligning the left edge of the pieced strip (the straighter one) with one of the grid lines, and just made sure the whole thing was 5 ½ inches all the way along by aligning and cutting about 10” of the length at a time. This meant the whole strip was not square, but each section was only a little bit out. I joined this to a leaf strip, had some lunch, stared at it for a while and decided I could live with that even though it wasn’t as neat as I originally wanted. I finished joining the strips into set of one pieced and one leaf strip, and decided to try and tidy up the ‘squareness’ of it in how I joined each of these sets together.

After a cup of tea and some more thought, I decided that just aligning the top edge of each strip set was not going to work. Visually, it’s more important for the seams joining the blue rectangles with the charm squares to be aligned than whether the top or bottom of the fabric aligned. So I started fudging it again. Back on the cutting board, I aligned one strip set with the gridlines, and marked the leaf fabric to continue the seamline from the pieced strip (stay with me now, it will all make sense soon…). Then I placed the next strip set, with right sides together on top of the leaf strip, and aligned the right hand edges of the fabric, and shifted the top piece up and down, until the seamline on the pieced section of the upper set, aligned with the line I’d marked on the lower set. Finally, I put a few pins across the top to hold the two sets together to get keep the alignment while I sewed the seam.

Finally, by keeping all the pieces flat and aligned with how I’d pinned it, I managed to sew all the strip sets together plus the additional leaf strip (so the leaf pattern is on both outside edges) and ended up with the panel shown in the photo below.

So it was a bit of a fussy and frustrating day, but I think it was worth it. If all the joins had turned out like the first one I did this morning, I would have thrown it away and started again because it would have been impossible to quilt…

Now I have something I can work with and I'll start thinking about what to do with the borders.

BERT

LRT3 - Chain Piecing

I had to laugh this afternoon...as I was chain piecing some sections together I was also thinking about how to explain the process, and promptly made a mistake 3 times in the same strip. Ah well, these things happen. So here's what should happen with chain piecing.

Chain piecing seems to be all about preparation, preparation, preparation. Get that right and all should go well…So how to do the preparation. First of all, carefully cut all the shapes evenly to size. While that works in theory, I discovered that the charm squares that I’d bought weren’t square at all, so when I matched the edge of the rectangles with the edge of one charm square consistently to align each square-rectangle set. This means I have one neat side and one ugly side which I’ll then trim later. As my squares are 5” I found that a dinner plate was a good size for holding the squares, and placing them alternately on the plate made them easier to pick up (ie one as a square, one as a diamond, as shown in the photo).

I put the plate of pieces somewhere handy. For me, that's on the left side of me with the side of the fabric to be sewn closest to the sewing machine . Then to start sewing, just pick up the first set, align it with the edge of a ¼” seam foot on your sewing machine and start sewing. Sewing at a moderate pace, allows you to control the set you are sewing, sew about ¾ along the seam, then pick up the next set and position it while you finish the seam on the first one. Don’t stop sewing at the end of the first set, just keep going, do a few stitches, then feed in the next set. What you’ll end up with is a string of sets joined together that looks like washing on a washing line as shown in the photo. Once you’ve finished the seam on all your sets, just snip the stitches in between each set and..Bob’s your uncle, you’ve got 126 sets all ready to be ironed.

You’ll find you’ll get into a rhythm of sewing and adding a set and finding the next one etc. I was so into the rhythm I ended up with a piecing song, - opposite pieces, straight sides together, sew the seam, next set. It’s a bit like the shopping list in ‘Teddy Bears Go Shopping’ – if you recite it to yourself as you go it makes sure your pieces are correctly matched and the sequence is comfortable and efficient.

For Life’s Rich Tapestry, I’ve done two lots of chain piecing – joining the square-rectangle units, then joining 2 sets of these into unit. As I have sets of six squares/triangles in the strips in my quilt, the strips were pieced the usual way rather than chain piecing so I could complete one strip at a time and avoid ending up with pieces upside down.

Happy Sewing,

Bert