Gemischt

Yesterday (Friday, my day "off") and this morning were quite productive. I expect Fridays will be my 'mainly me' days going forward, as I've gone back to the Dreadful Tuesday mindset from my working days. I was at a point in my job that I could take a paid day off each week and I chose Tuesdays because it usually took me hours to wind down from Monday night's chorus rehearsals. To give focus to those days, I started designating them for those tasks I'd been dreading (for days, weeks, months), steeling myself mentally for the hard slog ahead and dedicating the day to plowing through whatever onerous black cloud had been hanging over my psyche.

These days the dreadful trifecta is: clean the litter boxes, take my blood pressure, catch up on chorus and/or Mom's finances. Other tasks pop up occasionally; I'm certainly not looking forward to dealing with Mom's 1099s again, but that's what Tuesdays are for!

Back to the present. This happened yesterday.

I've received many compliments on the 'acid wash' of my denim coat. That's not acid wash--that's 30 years of legitimate wear and tear!

Thing 2 sat down to watch Jurassic Park midway through my pinning, and The Loud wandered in to join him, so that provided a nice background of family, familiarity, and the snarky comments (to and about the film in progress) that result. It made the whole pin-basting process much more entertaining.

Most of Friday morning and early afternoon was spent getting the top to the pin-basting stage. From the 'Please Take and Use!' donation bin at the Community First! Village Quilters meeting, I came home with 6 panels of what looked to be a deconstructed maxi-skirt.

Varying from 14-18" widths, each roughly 32" long

The combined area of the largest sections of the panels wouldn't provide even half a backing. I pulled other bits and pieces in an attempt to come up with a pieced backing idea, then spotted this bolt with a tag pinned to it: 80"x~96". Bingo.

This was a GoodWill/OpShop purchase from years ago. I seemed to have sewn the edges together almost as soon as it came out of the dryer, lo those many years ago, making it into a piece 80" wide by a gazillion yards long (judging by how long it took to use it all up!) In truth, I think the only other projects I used this fabric for were masks (as lining), some Baritone gifts, and four trash bags. I noticed the scraps and strings from some of those projects made it into the top I was basting.

The other element needed was borders so the flimsy, ~63"x~85", would finish out closer to 70"x90". That's where I decided to use those skirt panels, showcasing part of the bottom border in the mitered corners.

 

 

This morning I woke determined to try two new things in the process of quilting this: spacing of the quilting, and lifting of the weight. 

In the previous quilt, I felt the happy little clouds were a bit too closely spaced. This time I wanted to try adding additional soap lines to force myself to quilt not only further apart, but also more aligned to the corners of the rectangles and less aligned to the seams within the rectangles. To test my idea, I pulled out a page from the phone book I used to construct the blocks, drew some lines to test various spacings (1"? 1.5"?), and started drawing proof-of-concept "clouds".

Getting to this single page was a challenge in itself, as it meant pulling several newer phone books out of their storage bin before getting to the older, smaller book. I finally pulled everything out (which included a huge Grainger catalog and the book that arrived last week which fell to the floor because it wouldn't fit) and took an accounting:

Left: new, untouched books    Center: preferred, old books   Right: cut down pages

How many string quilts do I honestly think I'm going to make in the next 10-15 years, especially considering this is the sum total of my strings bins?

When this gets too full to cram in anything else, a string top is made. I've never created a second bin to hold more strings.

Certainly not enough quilts to warrant hanging onto 7 phone books and a huge catalog! The catalog and 3 of the new phone books got tossed into the recycling bin for an instant weight loss of 12 pounds. Two new books (different sizes) were returned to the bin first, topped with the old books, upon which I placed the cut pages. NOW that bin makes sense!

As I was quilting the previous quilt, I found that shoving and compressing the excess mass at my left as I moved the top under the needle was just as tiring and difficult as dragging the quilt side to side. Years ago I had read a quilter's blog in which she either described or showed her quilting rig. She also used a table-top quilting machine, but she raised the bulk of the quilt-in-progress using clips suspended from the ceiling, above the table. I've no intention of drilling yet more holes in my studio ceiling, but I could certainly piggy-back off the storage systems that are already hung! I didn't want the entire quilt lifted, but even two sections lifted out of my way could be a potential bonus.

Two binder clips and two 9' lengths of rope later, this is what I came up with:

The left clip is hanging from one of the chains holding my flimsy storage dowels and the right clip hangs from the support rod that holds 6 cubbies above my cutting station. Together they lift enough of the quilt on either side to allow me to easily move the remaining quilt back and forth under the needle. What an enormous difference to my quilting experience! My arms and shoulders can work freer and with no pain. Rather than dreading the ordeal, I'm looking forward to the accomplishment of turning a sandwich into a quilt.

As soon as I had the sandwich strung up, I drew my grid idea onto the first rectangle I wanted to quilt and hit the pedal. There was a bit of a learning curve (I tend to want to make the clouds fatter, which takes room away from the next line of clouds) but the first rectangle wasn't a disaster and the additional lines (I settled on 1.25" distance between them) proved to be helpful. So without lifting the needle, I soaped lines onto the next rectangle.

The rectangle block is longer than the table surface in front of the needle, so I make an extended drawing surface with my 10" square ruler.

In one rectangle it only took 2 stitches to remind me I had forgotten to remove the square before quilting! Fortunately, only the pressure foot had hit (and rode upon) the ruler, but the sound difference in the stitching was enough to alert me that something wasn't right. No needles were harmed in the learning of that lesson.

As it happened, the soap lines echo the seam lines very closely in this picture. The distance between the soap/cloud lines is greater though, which is what I wanted, allowing me to progress quicker through each block. Now my inner voice is guiding me with, "top of clouds on right, finish clouds, top of new clouds above the left side of the same line, finish clouds, new clouds above next line on right...."

Now that the proof-of-concept stitching has proven itself, I'll mark the soap grid on large sections of the top, instead of block by block as I go. There was no point in drawing that much marking for an unproven idea, though, so for the proofing period I was happy to do it piecemeal for 5 blocks.

I'm excited to working on this, relatively stress-free, tomorrow morning and seeing how far I can get before leaving to visit Mom. I expect I'll be getting so much more done now!