Today has been a day of treading water and going slightly backwards while picking a new direction. Short story: I have to pick up some stitches - almost my least favorite thing.
The details are that I started a quilt for my niece in 2014. The top has been done for a while. The next part of the story is that I bought a Flynn frame at the Vermont Quilt Festival in 2015. For those of you that don't know, a Flynn frame is for quilting on your domestic sewing machine. I thought this quilt was the perfect one for trying out the frame. That was a big mistake. The quilt is twin sized. It is much too big for practice. You should know that I don't like to make 'practice' sandwiches. Getting to know the Flynn frame will take practice and I'm just going to have to pick some projects for exactly that. They will be smaller projects. I have a few tops done that will be good for this but they will have to wait until after I get some gifts finished. So getting back to today - I took the quilt off the frame. I pin basted it as I unrolled the quilt. I had a feeling that I would have trouble when I got to the end - the backing was shorter than the top. I'm sure that it wasn't before I put it on the frame - oh dear. Well, I decided to ignore that and start quilting. I did some simple motifs in 3 or 4 blocks and then looked at the back. Ugh, one section had a small pleat. Yuck, there was loose backing between 2 parts. I knew then that I needed to do some frog stitch. Rip it, rip it, rip it. Fortunately, I don't have to pick out much. Tomorrow I'll figure out what to do next. See you then. I decided to accept this challenge after I saw that a friend was participating. This challenge is hosted by muppin.com. You can see all of the participants here.
First of all, let me give you an update on my guild's 2018 BOM. Named Starstruck, this sampler has 20 different star blocks. I am a little behind in getting everything pulled together so it may or may not be released this month. The goal is to get things ready by the 13th. Time will tell. For those of you that would like to participate, each month's information will be available free for 2 months. Videos will be available showing how to use Studio 180 Design tools such as the Tucker Trimmer and Wing Clipper in assembling the blocks. You can certainly piece without these tools but I hope you will see how much easier piecing becomes with them. You may have noticed that I call my blog Project Journal. My intent is to document my quilting progress. So let me fill you in on what I have been working on today. First of all, I finished piecing a pattern I am testing for The Quilt Pattern Magazine. This digital magazine only contains patterns that have been tested. If you go to their Corrections page you will see that they have had very few errors in their 7 years of publication. I'll talk more about TQPM in future posts. The other item today has been working on writing up and formatting the instructions for Starstruck. I have started learning Corel Draw for formatting my patterns. Similar to Adobe Illustrator, this programs allows me to draw diagrams, include photographs and format text. I'm starting to get the hang of it but it is slow going. Well, enough for now. Hope to see you tomorrow. |
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