Leader-Enders, by their nature/description, presume a "main" project is being constructed, the L&E pieces merely spacers. To that end, I needed a main project so I could advance the Lady of the Lake blocks, my chosen L&E challenge this year.
Last month in a bin of 'please take and use this!' fabric at the Community First! Village Quilters meeting room, I found some peach fabric that I knew would be a great color to back one of the N1C (Not 100% Cotton) Trip Around the World flimsies I completed last year. There was nearly 4 yards of it and I hoped it was enough.
I also needed to add some borders to the flimsy to get it to twin size, and I found some cute pink heart fabric in my yardage drawer. It had come from Nann for the backing of a Magpie hug, and there were 2 hunks of it wrapped around the cardboard.
After taking measurements of everything I wanted to use/use up, I sat down and did some drawing/planning. Could I back the whole thing with the peach? No--it was just enough short that I'd need to supplement it with another fabric. So, hoping there'd be enough pink heart fabric for that too, I started in figuring.
When the dust settled and I stopped counting on my fingers, it appeared there'd be enough of the pink heart fabric for the flimsy borders, a large quadrant of the back, and the forty or so 4.5" squares needed to make the checkerboard/zipper pattern (with enough extra for 3 more squares if needed for some reason).
So that's what I spent all day Tuesday doing. Well...that and cutting out 6" squares of lights and darks and drawing the lines on the light squares so I could run them through as L&Es. My intent is to reconstruct the mis-sewn LotL blocks with HTSs from my stash, using a different 'new stash' pairing in every one of the old blocks.
Things went along quite swimmingly until it came time to sew everything together. I'd finished the two panels of large quadrant/checkerboard/small quadrant, and was constructing the final long piece of checkerboard to join everything together. But dang it, I kept coming up several blocks short! How could that happen? I'd cut and sewn everything the maths told me I needed, yet I still needed more?
Resigned to accepting my diminishing addition skills, I cut the last scrap of the pink heart fabric and paired it with a strip of the peach (still plenty of that), constructed more 4 patches and finally got the entire back sewn together. By then it was well past 7 and I was hungry and beat. As I made the trip through my studio to turn off all the lights for the night, this is what I found:
Yesterday morning I got it all pin basted. I basted it back side up because it'll be easier to mark the quilting pattern on those large sections rather than all the 2" squares on the front.
The peach fabric turned out to be a polyester (which is in keeping with the N1C fabrics in the flimsy), and has a different sheen/color depending on its direction. Once quilted and in use, that won't make any difference. During the construction of this I was reminded again how unyielding polyester can be. Cotton always has a little give--polyester, never.
During one of my visits to my LQS for machine parts, I wandered into the thread alcove and fell in love with this King Tut "Mummy's Dearest". It'll be perfect for this quilt.
Now that this sandwich is ready to be quilted, it's time to grab another flimsy and figure out its back, for the next Main Thing.
And finally, July's machine part deux: Singer's 503A Slant-O-Matic, or "The Rocketeer"!
It runs but needs more than just a few drops of oil here and there. The manual is very explicit and tomorrow I'll be oiling and lubing all the areas specified.
I'm thinking of using The Rocket to zigzag batting hunks together. It can do straight and zigzag stitches without needing cams (like the black one seen at its left). The cams (of which I have only the blind stitch) are for fancier stitches.
Oh my gosh, I just has the wildest thought: given the one cam I have, could my son make these others with his 3D printer? I'll bet he'd love to give it a try!
My mother's machine had cams, was a similar colour but the shape is wrong. I had no love for that machine and it went in the house clearance, by the time I reached it I was done with the whole process. I swear that it knew when it had me alone in the house because it never played up when mum was in to sort it out.
ReplyDeleteI vaguely remember a cam machine when I was in my teens, but I think the cams were flat. And aqua colored? Singer was always pushing the envelope, that's for sure!
DeleteC