Quilting

There is a running joke about me and seam rippers. I even have a mini quilt on the wall, made by a dear friend, that is a paper pieced seam ripper. I hate to rip. I will do a lot of things to avoid ripping. That being said, there are times when it is just necessary and I have to suck it up and do what is right.

I tried a new design on the long arm over the holiday. I have wanted to do a nice Baptist Fan for ages, and I got a design and gave it a whirl. I need to note that this is a tricky pattern, as the rows have to nest exactly for it to look right and in 14 years of owning a long arm I have never been successful at doing this.

It was with great trepidation and excitement that I got a pattern and of course, started it off on an important quilt, not on a practice quilt. I’m not sure what is wrong, but it wouldn’t sew off. Keeps saying there’s an obstruction and it stops. I think somehow it’s a combination of the speed of the machine and the long sweeping arcs of the pattern because the error always happens on the outermost two bands of each fan. EVERY TIME. Oh my lamb chops, I was tearing my hair out. One third of the way in to the first row, I realized that I was not going to be able to figure this out right now, and that this wasn’t the quilt to do the figuring on. So I started over using a design that I know my machine loves to sew out and it went without a single hitch (which is another sign that it’s something with that design, not a problem with my machine alone).

So now I have a completely quilted quilt, with 1/3 of the first row that includes a badly formed baptist fan. Heavy sigh as I contemplate the seam ripper. I spent 4 hours last night sitting in my big chair with the TV on while I painstakingly removed the quilting stitch by stitch. I know for me it is much easier to do that when I can manipulate the quilt instead of leaving it on the farm and picking it out there, but what a nightmare. I’m probably about 75% of the way done picking out just that 1/3 of a row, but it will be so worth it. I keep telling myself that over and over.

I’m going to have to go back with something that matters far less and try to figure out what is wrong with the fan design. When I just trace the pattern (computer only, no needle running) it traces fine, so I suspect that the speed is too great on the longest arcs, so the needle drags just enough to make the machine think it has hit an obstruction so it throws an error. I have some ideas on how to counter act that problem but it’s going to take some practical testing to figure that out.

This hits the big question in my quilting life. I want it to be easy. I don’t want to have to test on 3 different quilts to figure out exactly how I have to hold my mouth to sew this pattern off. On the other hand, knowing how to combat this behavior for a pattern with long arcs that could move too fast would be really useful knowledge. I need to suck it up and do this but I need to do some research first so I have some clue of what I’m doing. In the mean time, I still have a lot of ripping to do…..

Quilting has brought a lot of things into my life – there is always a quilt to warm you in my house. There’s fabric to warm you; lots of fabric. There’s a whole room dedicated to quilting but the biggest things that quilting has brought is friendship.

This weekend I spent with 70 or so ladies from the Dallas Quilt Guild at a retreat. There was sewing and laughter and singing and reminiscing of friends who were no longer with us and more sewing. Sewing can be a solitary pass time, but quilters have always found ways to create a community. Women used to gather around a frame to quilt a quilt together in a quilting bee. While many modern quilters still hand quilt, a lot of us do not, and have found other ways to share our passion and our community.

At retreat, we all bring our sewing machines, and equipment, and projects and setup in a resort ballroom and sew for a long weekend. I always get a ton of work done at a retreat because I don’t have the distraction of housework and laundry and there is somebody else is doing the cooking. Some ladies don’t sew much at all, but enjoy the maximum companionship for the weekend instead. Another nice benefit is getting to walk around and see what everybody else is working on. There are always some new techniques or patterns that I’ve never seen before, as well as a lot of “well I started this in 1998 and I’m finally going to finish it”. I brought a bit of both with me on this trip.

Quilting means there is always a common connection so it’s easy to make new friends. I went on my first Quilting Cruise in 2015 – didn’t know a single person in the group but I figured that since we were all quilters, I would make a few friends. That excursion has led to a treasured group of friends who still travel together all over the globe, sewing and knitting as we go.

Over the years I have noticed that my work friends tend to come and go. We are friends because we are thrown together by a project and the regularity of work and as jobs change, those friends come and go. Quilting has given me a circle of friends over the last 30 years that has remained very constant. Throughout our lives, quilting is the thread that ties us all together. This weekend especially, I am renewed by those connections. I can sew at home any time I want, but retreating reminds me of the wealth of friends I have gained through quilting.

I started seriously quilting 30 years ago. That’s a long time for me to work continuously at a skill. The only things I’ve done longer than that are sew clothing, knit and play the piano. I’ve come a long way in 30 years, just like I’ve come a long way from when I started to knit and when I started piano lessons.

I can still remember my first trip to the Dallas Quilt show. I don’t know the year, probably was early 90’s sometime, but what I do remember was having my breath taken away by a quilt. It was a log cabin block with appliquéd floral wreaths on them. It spoke to everything in quilting that appeals to me and I immediately signed up for the block of the month kits for the quilt. I got the first one and started right away and it didn’t take long for me to realize I was in way over my head. The piecing of the blocks wasn’t bad, but the hand appliqué was awful. I knew I had the option to do machine applique, but that’s not what I wanted for this quilt. I wanted hand work to go along with the bits of embroidery that were incorporated in the patterns.

I collected all the block kits and set them aside a long time ago. Many lifetimes ago actually, many houses, many moves and several states ago if I am really honest. There were times I wasn’t sure if I even still had it, but it wasn’t something I would have gotten rid of if I had come across it while downsizing.

This past weekend, I worked more on unpacking my sewing room. I am down to 16 boxes and this is the closest to being unpacked than I’ve been in a very long time. I was getting down to the bottom of a box when a green fabric caught my eye. It was my Log Cabin Wreath kits. I pulled them out of the box and it looks like they are all there, including the one that I started and put away all those years ago. The green fabric is very dated now. It’s very early 90’s quilting, if you know what I mean. The background fabric is fine, and most of the fabrics for the wreaths are fine, but I will probably update the green. Actually, what I might do is keep some of that green, as a nod to the original project, but make the green part scrappy and add in a number of other fabrics.

I am positive now, that my skills have matured to the point where I can do this project justice. The patterns gave me the same jolt of excitement that they did all those years ago. I am beyond excited that I still have them after all these years, and I cannot wait to get started on this project. I know I have 85 billion projects already in work but this one has been waiting for a very long time.