26 July 2012

Airing the Laundry

Yeah, I posted that nice (mostly) calm bit about my quilt earlier. Out of character? Yeah, I thought so too. Let me gripe a bit and then your faith in my insanity will be restored. Ok.

So, this quilt. It's big. And I mean HUGE. The first frustration that I encountered was that I did my math wrong. I calculated square inches of a king size bedspread and the square inches yielded from one and a half yards each of eight different fabrics. I allowed for quite a bit of extra since you loose some in the seams. I gave myself a little more than that, even. Somewhere along the line, though, my multiplication on the whiteboard went awry. I think I'll hit the right size exactly... if I'm lucky. There may be bigger borders than is conventionally accepted. It'll still be pretty.

The second frustration is with the construction of the quilt. It's an easy quilt. You cut long strips of fabric, sew the long strips together, and then slice them to the appropriate widths. You then carefully arrange and line up all of the little squares in each strip. That demands a bit of pulling and wiggling of the fabric to get it just right, which wouldn't normally be a problem. But it is. Why? Because in the slicing the strips step, you slice right through your seams, leaving vulnerable-to-separation seams in your wake. Any little bit of pulling and you pop a couple of stitches. This, again, wouldn't always be a problem, since in garment sewing, you typically leave a larger seam allowance. In quilting, the seam allowance is about the size of four stitches.

The third frustration was that through my own stupidity, I sewed two of the carefully pieced, delicately assembled strips together the wrong way. So then I had to seam rip eight feet of fabric apart, trying not to rip the strips to pieces in the process. Thirty minutes of frustration.

On a more positive note, it does look beautiful.

And to make you laugh:

A literal piece of laundry being aired. It's prominently displayed on the banister. This is what happens when you drop clothes on the stairs in our house.

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