LRT7 – Structural/Stabilising Quilting and Wine?

This weekend I’ve done some structural or stabilizing quilting on Life’s Rich Tapestry. What’s amused me is the amount of concentration it takes to do long lines of ‘stitching in the ditch’. Most of the ‘ditch stitching’ that I’ve done before has been lots of short lines, so the fact that every time I day dreamed I caught the wrong piece of fabric was interesting. What’s more, I had a glass or two of wine at lunch time today, which seemed to make the first couple of rows easier, and the last couple harder (sleepiness setting in :-). On the whole, I’m quite pleased with the results anyway.

I’m trying to keep the pieces square with this stabilizing quilting, by starting with two horizontal lines on either side of the leaf border at the top of the quilt, then doing the vertical lines in the centre, which I’ll follow with stitching along the horizontal leaf border at the bottom (refer to the photo of the whole quilt below). While this appraoch has kept the squares and vertical lines of the centre section nice and straight, the horizontal border at the bottom seems to have stretched or moved, as had the outer border in the top right hand corner. The lead to the fabric puckering and the edge I was going to ditch stitch on the leaf border looking more like a scalloped one than a straight one (as shown in the photo above). So… I’ve repinned the bottom border and top right corner this afternoon and, as the photo to the leftshows, this seems to have smoothed out the issue enough and straightened the lines again.

Despite the slipping of the lower border of the quilt, last weekend’s approach to pins (refer LRT6 post) seemed to work – I had enough pins to keep the work stable, without getting in the way too much. I’m happy that the final result is both nice and even and straight. So any errors were from my trying to think about something else while I was quilting, not the pins :-D . And...here's the result.
Happy crafting until next time,
Bert

LRT 6 – Quilt Sandwich and Basting.

While the title here may suggest I’ve spent the day baking, this couldn’t be further from the truth. I’ve spent today pin-basting the quilt sandwich (backing, batting and quilt-top) of my ‘Life’s Rich Tapestry’ creation. This is a slow, careful process that gave me some time for reflection and appreciation for the art of quilting. I’ll cover the sandwiching process in the techniques section of my website soon, I thought it would be more constructive to discuss the basting here today, as good information on this seems to be hard to find.

I’ve made nearly 20 quilts now, and while each one has taught me something different, and I’m always keen to experiment and learn something new. From previous projects I knew that sewing basting (by machine or hand) is more difficult than it looks with a large quilt, so the decision is not really whether to pin baste. Pin-basting is absolutely necessary for the end product to reflect the hard work you’ve put into it. Rather, the decision is whether to sew or tack as well as pin. For this project I’m going to try just pins, combined with a two-step process for quilting – structural quilting, then decorative quilting (which I’ll cover in next week’s post). The results of my pin-ing efforts today can be seen in the photo below.

You may notice from the photograph that I’ve flouted the ‘baste every 2inches’ principle and I’ve done this on purpose. In my experience, pin basting can work but only if the pins are in the right place. So I’ve adopted the approach of pin-around-the-quilting-line to see how that works. For the structural quilting, I’m aiming to just follow the vertical and horizontal lines in the piecing, so I’ve pinned through the centre of each piece leaving enough room for the foot of the sewing machine to fit around the pins. The reason I haven’t placed the pins in a 2inch grid is that I find it very frustrating to be constantly stopping to remove pins - it makes my sewing wonky and breaks my concentration. Who knew sewing could be that aggravating ? J