Friday, August 29, 2014

Uhm, You Missed a Spot

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting Thormanby Island again. My generous friend A invited our little gang of island-hopping quilters that usually descend on Mayne Island every February for a retreat. As you can imagine, our February weekends are almost always spent indoors, enjoying the cozy sewing room while buckets of cold winter rain fall outside.  Let me just say that our August weekend together had 90% more sunshine and about 20 degrees of Celcius more to enjoy (as an August weekend should!).

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The perfect cabin quilt!

It stood to reason that I should bring along my almost finished scrap vomit quilt - which, by the way, I will now refer to as the Scrapalicious quilt. This quilt has been over a year and a half in the making (actually I've pieced two of these tops and have enough squares cut to make a few more!).

  • Katy's fab tutorial for the quilt is here
  • See my Anti-Voodoo piecing tutorial for making sure your squares make it from the design wall to the machine in the right order using a method I learned years ago from a favourite quilting teacher. This works for efficiently piecing blocks into a quilt top as well.
  • A post including a pic of the second top I've pieced with different coloured "B" blocks is here 
Back in February I'd finished the quilting and attached the binding while on Mayne.  As I do with all large quilt bindings, I pressed the binding to the back and temporarily secured it with tiny dots of Roxanne's Glue-Baste-It.  Hand-sewing the binding has been a hit and miss 'whenever I feel like it' activity for months and it needed to just. get. done. I figured if I brought the quilt along to sleep under, I could finish off the binding in the daylight hours while sitting on the sunny deck. Which I did. Wearing a bikini. OMG. That's all I'm saying about that.

Scrapalicious by Poppyprint

And then I came home and washed the quilt. When I pulled it from the washer and saw batting and frayed thread, I had a momentary coronary event thinking that something had ripped the quilt, until my brain registered that, in fact, I had missed sewing down about 20" of binding!!! So, yeah, I missed a spot. Oops.

Scrapalicious by Poppyprint
Scrapalicious: the Full Frontal

So, although you've seen several iterations of this quilt from blocks, to top, to quilted top, now it is finally complete, washed and folded on the back of our family room couch for everyone to enjoy.  Even this little gnomey.

Scrapalicious by Poppyprint

I free-motion quilted it in an all-over interlocking flower pattern that I learned last year in a FMQ class with local teacher Lynne Fanthorpe.  I had so much difficulty with the Sulky 40wt thread I was using - it was breaking constantly and driving me mental with stopping/starting and burying threads. I finally had to abandon it from frustration but when I resumed quilting at Mayne my friends helped me discover that the variegated spool I was using was simply 'bad thread'. It broke with a gentle tug! I had pulled my hair out and came very close to tears thinking that my machine, the tension, the batting, the many needles I tried, or my skills were to blame. I've never experienced bad thread before. Luckily, I had a second spool of the exact same brand and colour variegation that I purchased on the same day as the offensive spool. The second one worked PERFECTLY FINE. Bizarre. 

Next time I'm sticking with Aurifil thread and less involved quilting. I'll also do a more careful check of the binding before my quilt gets its first wash!

Scrapalicious by Poppyprint

11 comments:

Live a Colorful Life said...

I have always wanted to do a scrapalicious quilt (I'll leave the other name alone as it conjures up things I don't want to think about...). Your quilt is fabulous!!

Katy Cameron said...

It looks great, but I can imagine that feeling of panic thinking that the washing machine had eaten your quilt!

Kirsty @ Bonjour Quilts said...

Super scrapalicious - well done on finally finishing! I love, love, love that flower FMQ design...one of the nicest floral ones I've seen.
I've had a bad quilting experience with a thread different to what I usually use, I wonder if it was just a bad batch? It was a silk finish thread and it gave me all sorts of tension problems. Hmm, maybe I'll try it again one day.

What Comes Next? said...

love this quilt, and the new name is so much more appropriate! I really must get you to show me the quilting design - it is fabulous!

Leanne said...

I too love the quilted flowers. The quilt is lovely too. Sewing a quilt binding in a bikini is an interesting image, however, but still, it sounds like a lovely retreat.

Carla said...

I. Love. This. Top of my to do list again after seeing yours ; )

Nicole said...

Yay for a finish! And I love that quilt - I've got my own on my bed right now, but I want to make another one.

Elsa said...

Love this quilt ~ so colorful and looks so cozy. I got a bad spool of Aurfil once ~ I was wondering all the same things as you till I realized it wasn't any good..

Dianne said...

You looked fab stitching your binding down in that bikini and I have a photo to prove it! :0)

trudys_person said...

Congratulations on the finish - that one must feel good! It's a great quilt!

www.randomthoughtsdoordi.com said...

That's a funny story about the binding. I often winder when I'll do that since I glue basted my binding before sewing it down. Lovely finished quilt