This is my #notgoing blog – as in #notgoing to Festival of Quilts.
I sometimes think that I would love to go – then I think no. I would love to see the quilts on display and the shopping opportunities, but who am I kidding? I am not good at crowds, and find Malvern Spring Show overwhelming, although I can cope with the Autumn show there. So FoQ would not have been sensible for me I think.
So what have I done instead?
I have gone back to The Beast – the memory quilt made for my daughter out of my late husband’s old rugby jerseys. (Regular readers will be bored with The Beast by now, but if you want more information, see my previous blogs.)
Early last month it was just too hot to do anything, so like many of us I just moped around. Then the weather broke and I found I was still moping around (it had become a habit) but I was starting to get anxiety symptoms that I could not explain. How could I fix it? Do something! What did I have that I could do? The Beast!
The problem is, I have done so much work on it and yet The Beast can still fill me with dread. It is being quilted at home on a standard machine (although it is a machine with a larger harp) and there are times when I just don’t have the energy to quilt wrangle. Add that to an elderly Labrador who gets separation anxiety every time I go upstairs to sew and sometimes it just gets too much like hard work! However, it has to be done. So I set up my 6ft x3ft folding table in the lounge (it doesn’t leave much room, but I don’t have anyone else to bother except the dog!), set up my sewing machine and went for it!
I could also meander down the road of ‘it is not perfect’ etc but you all hear that far too often.
I hit a snag though. I have nearly completed the planned straight line quilting – I don’t do fmq yet, and on this quilt it would have been impossible anyway. The snag is that, because the quilt is non standard construction, I think it needs more quilting. This is where my lack of experience really shows, in my opinion.
The quilt is made up of 6.5 inch squares of interfaced ‘breathable’ rugby shirt fabric, 80/20 wadding and cotton backing. It is also king sized. This has made it really heavy – the top is significantly thicker than a cotton top. Also, due to the thickness of the top and seams that refused to press, I have not been able to stitch in the ditch. I have therefore echo quilted the blocks in long lines either side of the seams in both directions.
I hope that you can see what I mean in the picture above.
This means that my quilting lines are about 5.5 inches apart. On a normal quilt with this wadding that would be fine, but this is big and heavy and I am hoping that my daughter will be able to actually use it – it will not just be an ornament. So it is going to be pulled around and washed, and I am worried that the stitching is not going to be robust enough to cope.
So my thought is to quilt a single line down the middle of each block, but not a straight line – a gently wavy line. The thought is that this means I am not going to get upset at an additional line that is not parallel (and I would) and it will also provide a bit of a contrast to all of the straight lines. My Quilting group meets on Sunday, so I will ask for advice there.
UPDATE: (hot off the press!) the opinion of the Ystradgynlais Quilters was no more machine quilting required. There is some fussy cutting (of badges) so the feeling was that more quilting would interfere with the overall look. There is some hand quilting to be done, but that will be done relatively easily.
I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel on this one, even though I thought I would never get there. I have even started attaching the binding! Excited? Me? Whatever gave you that idea!
I have realised that this has been holding me up on getting on with all of the other ideas that I have in my head for quilts, so it needs to be done. My daughter might even get it near her birthday! Well, maybe Christmas…..
I was one of the #notgoing but it didn’t mean I wasn’t busy!
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