Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Second String Quilt

I finished a string quilt to give to Mrs. Furui's volunteer group. This didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped but I guess I learned something making it.

I don't do well yet on overall quilt designs so I thought quilting inside the dark strips would be a good idea. Well, I learned the hard way that there is too much thickness at the crossing seams. All that extra fabric plus the foundation fabric just was too hard for my machine needle to go through. There was a lot of slipping around which resulted in irregular stitches.

And I also quilted this in halves which means that when I joined the two pieces I found that my directional quilting was going to wrong way. No one is going to ever look that closely at this but I know it isn't the greatest job...

The Law of Murphy was well at play on this quilt but I almost can say that about all my quilts. I made strips for the binding, right? I connected the strips, right? I like mitered corners on my binding so want the long strip to go all the way around, right? I randomly started somewhere in the middle of the quilt and started attaching the binding. Wouldn't you know that strip connection falls just where I don't want it... at the corner. Harder to miter with a lot of extra thickness. This happens regularly to me. It seems no matter where I start attaching the binding, the connection ends up at the corner! And on this quilt it happened twice! Two out of four corners! Arrgh!

This is done. I will wash it this week and give it to Mrs. Furui. She will probably wash it again. She STILL finds cat hairs on my quilts even after I wash them!

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