Since the NETOGA isn't until August, this might seem to be a bit of a jump to many. But how I sometimes get distracted in the middle of one project (rebuilding the 103) by another project (rebuilding the old drill press and belt/disc sander) which gets paused by other projects (restoring the 221s), I figured it would be best to get an early start and put all those other projects further on hold.
For fabric I decided to keep the wood grain, but replace the Sponge Bob print with some fabric my wife had purchased while we were living in South Africa.
My final blocks are going to be 6x6" finished (6.5x6.5 unfinished) so I needed each of my Flying Geese units (the small sections made of of the 1 blue + 2 orange triangles) to be 1.5x3" finished (2x3.5" unfinished). I used Melanie Ham's chart here to get the sizes for my initial cuts. I have seen videos where you cut the material to exact sizes so there is no additional trimming needed. The problem I have with those is that I tended to end up with slight angles in my finished units that I needed to trim way, so my units turned out smaller than needed to finish a 6x6 block. The style Melanie demonstrated leaves a little bit of slop that needs to be trimmed off before combining the Flying Geese. For me that's a plus. According to her chart to make my units I needed my small pieces to be 2.5" square and the large ones 4.5" square.
I ended up cutting out enough fabric to make 13 finished blocks, which was a good thing because of the piecing tragedy that happened later on.
Since I'm using a directional pattern fabric with the wood grain, I needed to make sure that I rotated half of the blocks 90 degrees so the patterns would line up later. Then then I set the rotated pieces aside (making note of their orientation).
Next I marked the first set on the diagonal, offset to each side of center by 1/4". My local quilt shop (Sew Inspired) had a real cool ruler I bought called a Quick Qtr. Setting it to straddle the center line gave me 1/4" on either side to mark.
Once they were all marked I pinned two small pieces to opposite corners of each larger piece so that the lines ran from one smaller to the next then stitched on the lines. Actually on the inside of the lines. Another useful if obvious after the fact tip from Melanie Ham; your marker never hits exactly on your laid out straight line, it's always just a little wide.
A quick aside about the pins. They are another thing my wife picked up in South Africa. They are a weirdly perfect size. 1 3/8" and thinner that regular pins, but not as thin as heirloom pins. Try as we might we can't find them here. We've had them for about 7 years are they are starting to show the wear. I tracked down the store she bought them from online and if worse comes to worse I'm set to call them up and order more.
Once all 52 5.25" lines were stitched it was time for a quick press to set the stitches. I'm not sure if quilters always do this, I've seen lots of videos where it's not mentioned, but in my tailoring mentor stressed the need for pressing, pressing and more pressing. So I press fabric any time I so much as think about looking at it.
After setting the stitches the sections were cut in half along the center line between the two stitches.
Since the sewing room still isn't finished I've commandeered the dining room table as my work bench. The dining room also functions as our son's music practice room. So while cutting I was serenaded by the dulcet tones of his bass practice.
After cutting and the musical interlude it was time for some more pressing to press the small triangle 'ears' up.
Then back to the cutting table to mark the 90 degree rotated smaller squares. I could have done this at the same time I marked the first set of small squares, but I'm still a newbie at this and I wanted to verify the rotation was right with the first set of squares sewn in place.
The new squares were pinned to the work units aligned at the open corner.
Once in place the new pieces were stitched down along the marks, one square for each work piece. 104 rows of stitches a 3" each.
Another round of pressing to set stitches.
And another note about pressing. A lot of the videos I see, when people do press, they don't press. They kind of touch the fabric with the iron and maybe wiggle it a tiny bit. The fabric doesn't even lay flat after they go over it. Wrong! It's called pressing. You press! It's you against the fabric. You are bending it to your will, breaking its spirit. And you never move the iron while it's on the fabric, that's how you over work it and ruin it. You put the iron down and press it, hard, like those stitches kicked your dog and you want revenge. In the olden days irons weighted like 6 pounds for 'lightweight' and up. Modern irons weight about 2. You need to make up for that lack of weight with some down force.
Cut. Again on the center line between the stitches of the newly added piece.
And press.
To make the next steps easier I took time to lop off all the little dog ears from the now completed Flying Geese units.
As I stated earlier, this method is more forgiving in creation of the individual units. Since they are now complete it's time to trim them up to make them ready to connect.
First I squared up the "top" of each unit. Since my final size for each one it 2x3.5" unfinished, I made sure not to take too much off the top. Trying to not go below about 2 1/16th after squaring. Like below, most just needed a small trim on a side to level everything.
Next I rotated the unit to the trim the "bottom" to make the unit 2"
Next I aligned the center point of the big triangle to have 1 3/4" from it to a side (I always had the point up and trimmed the "left" side first).
Then I rotated it around and trimmed the opposite side to that the unit was 3.5" wide. Doing everything right also meant this side was 1 3/4" from the center point as well.
I'm still getting used to using quilting rulers. I had to quit paying attention to the number lines, trying to line everything up on an exact number usually meant the line was covering what I was trying to line up. Instead I would rotate it to the off side measuring points. For cuts that were going to be right on the inch, I used the half inch side so the inch lines would just be dashes that I could line up. And for the half inches I used the full inch scales. This made it easy to see where I was lining my edges at. I didn't start doing that until about half way through so some of my initial trimming was as much as 1/32" off. Doesn't sound like much, but it does make a difference when piecing things together.
Speaking of trimmings
That step was probably the longest. I think it was about 4 hours worth of measuring and trimming, with a few breaks thrown in. I almost went to bed when I finished that, but decided to do one more step.
At this point I needed to break my units into two groups. Each unit either had the wood grain running horizontal across the middle triangle or vertical with the middle triangle. So here I needed to stitch two like units tip to base of the middle triangle, right sides facing in.
This is where the pressing turns serious. The stitches were set. Next, a sleeve roll was used to press the seams open. First the seam allowance is pressed open, then the work piece is flipped over and the right sides are given a good press on the sleeve roll. Finally the piece is laid flat on the board and the seem allowance is pressed within an inch of its life. It's very important to get a really good, open seam press here. The bulk is increasing by this point. I'm not using thin quilting fabric, or cheap Joann weight cotton. Sloppy presses or pressing to one side or the other is going to result in bulges that could cause the presser foot to twist the fabric when it hits them. A modern machine would probably refuse to proceed with some weird beep code when getting to the even later, bulkier stages.
At this point a took the rest of the night off and went to bed. I was pretty sore from all the pressing.
This morning I was in the home stretch. Which is usually where I make the biggest mistakes. So I very methodically laid out each work piece pair, double and triple checked alignments before stitching each set together. For my first pairs, I laid a horizontal wood grain piece oriented so the triangles pointed down. The to the left of it a vertical wood grain piece was laid so that the triangle pointed left.
Then I took a breath, re-checked them against a good finished block, then stitched them together.
Another round of vigorous, nay, violent three step pressing followed.
At last, the final stitches! I had one of the previous good blocks in my lap the whole time. I aligned the blocks, held the planned seam line in my fingers, opened them and compared the result to the block in my lap. And, four or five times I had grabbed the wrong side and would have made a mess if I hadn't kept rechecking before stitching.
And yes, there was another round of hate-pressing after this, but at this point even I'm tired of seeing the pressing pictures. So suffice to say it was the most vengeance filled pressing of them all.
All told, I think it was about 18 hours over three days to finish 12 more blocks. I'm a slow worker when it comes to sewing. My mentor often complemented my results while chastising my time management. But I'm retired so I just enjoy the end results.
Well most of the end results. As I admitted, mistakes were made. Here's what happens when I hurry and don't pay attention to details.
Finally, just with some quick math, through this project I ran somewhere over 17,000 stitches through Black Swan. Not a single dropped stitch, tension error, mis-feed or snag. Nobody tell Wicked Queen, but treadling on the 201 was the funnest part of this project.
No comments:
Post a Comment