Still Learning

While the Indian Spiderweb was in the wash, I started laying out the sandwich for Sister. I had a long length of lavengray that's been in the stash for.e.ver, bought when I was new to this hobby and thought I'd want tons of plain meh colors. Once I folded this length in half and sewed a generous seam along the selvedge (trimming off that tight edge afterwards, of course), it would be the perfect length and width for this top.

Bottom pole = next in line. Meh lavender/gray hung alongside.

Too perfect.

Absolutely NO wiggle room in the length for shift, and I've played (and lost) that game before! There were still plenty of these scraps and sewn-together strings left in my N1C bin, so in the course of a couple of Psych episodes (I recently bought Seasons 2-8 so Shawn and Gus have been keeping me company in the sewing room) I extended/lengthened the backing by 4-1/2" with a strip of those scraps sewn in.

On to the sandwiching!

I got this far before remembering this was not the plan! It had occurred to me the night before: with a completely plain back (it was completely plain the night before, when I had this apostrophe), it would make more sense to pin everything 'backwards'--have all the pins accessible from the backing, where I was planning to mark and quilt this, not the top!

Unclip, unsandwich, start over.

That's the plan--start with the flimsy!

With the extension, there was no holding-of-breath while the edges were checked for alignment and coverage.

I even slipped a piece of Handsome's 'brother' fabric in there.

I was fortunate enough to have my son streaming that evening on his Twitch account, playing some goofy mystery game "Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney". His voice was a fun distraction, and I would occasionally get up and write something in the chat stream to give him a laugh. A very cool way to pass the hours and stay in touch!

My final step before placing a sandwich under my quilting needle is to baste down the top edge. I put the bed extension table on my Brother, dial the stitch length to 4 or 5 (I piece at 2, the dial goes up to 7), and stitch 1/8" from the edge all the way around. I've rarely had trouble doing this step first, but if by the time I'm quilting the borders things have shifted too much, it's easy to pull out the basting stitches and smooth everything back down.

Here's the Still Learning (from my mistakes) part: it seemed that every one of those pins made it their purpose in life to catch on the edge of the extension table!

It wasn't truly as bad as every pin catching, but there were enough! And, within seconds of starting this basting, I crashed into a pin I hadn't seen (I was relying on seeing the pins from the top, not flipping the sandwich and checking) and broke the needle. The timing wasn't affected, thank goodness--that Brother can take a lickin'!--but it's always heart-stopping when it happens.

Knowing the drawbacks, I might try this approach again. The proof of this pudding will be in the quilting process.