Tuesday, May 7, 2024

Not Doll Dresses! Not Human Clothes, Either

(with the caveat that I did sew a few more pieces of doll clothes today, but I gave them to someone and did not take photos.)

Poking around in the archives here will show that I do like making patchwork, but have pretty much never made a quilt (with one single straight line exception.)  I have had a stash of pieced quilt tops in my closet for years; some I took a good look at it and said "It was fun to make but I am never going to finish that" and donated some to the craft thrift store.  I still had the stash of pieced quilt tops, it was just a smaller stash, somewhat more aligned with my personal tastes.

A big part of the reason I hadn't finished them was because...well...batting is expensive. So, when one of the local Walmart stores remodeled somewhat recently and put two rolls of batting on clearance, I snapped those up.  And then they sat in the closet. For quite a while.  Kind of in the way (I had to move them every time I wanted to use a backdrop for doll photos that wasn't the painted stage backdrop.)

So, instead of realizing that I could just put them in the top of the closet where the quilt tops were, I decided that Now Is The Time To Make Quilts.

Which required finally acquiring a quilting/darning foot, which I got cheap via eBay.  I absolutely do not plan to make quilting something I do regularly, so cheap is fine.

And I do understand that I will probably never do enough free motion quilting to be anywhere near good at it, but I did want to practice on something smaller first.  I got into the unsorted scraps from relatively recent projects and chose a pink chambray and a green plaid, and added a thrifted floral that I didn't have a lot of

Then I cut 96 little triangles that I sewed into 48 squares that I sewed into chevrons.  I loosely stitched some batting off-cuts to roughly the same size, then made and pinned the quilt sandwich with more of the floral as the backing fabric.

I moved my sewing machine to the end of my sewing table, and put the ironing board next to the table (where I normally sit) to help support the thing--it's 16" x 21" so I probably could have worked with it with the sewing machine in the normal place, but that won't be an option for anything larger so I wanted to get a feel for the new position.  I still haven't figured out the best place to put the lamp, but, overall, it worked.

Like I said, I did not expect to be good at this, nor do I expect to gain enough experience to become good at it.  But! It was easier to get a feel for than I expected.

I had a few false starts, which were easy enough to pick out so I could start over a few times, until I got to a point where I felt like things were going well enough to keep going.

Then I confidently turned the rest of the floral print into half inch double fold bias tape

...which I had problems applying, so I looked things up and discovered that "double fold" is not generally whats used, and people generally start with a strip that's more than 2" wide.  I have learned!

I also started trying to apply the bias tape with the bias tape foot, and I didn't think I could figure out how to miter the corners using that, so I curved the corners.  Which the foot couldn't handle, either (at least not under my guidance.)  I ended up unfolding one edge of the bias tape and sewing that to the back, then flipping the rest around to the front and edge stitching.  This is something I am obviously very comfortable doing with shirt button bands--nice, flat shirt button bands.  Things didn't go so well with the considerably more three-dimensional edges here.  It was a learning experience, it's fine.

I am already considering cutting this up to make into something else (what would that be? no idea, but it's a possibility.)

And then I took the trimmed-off batting scraps from the above and laid them out to make another, smaller quilt sandwich, purely for practice


It's a mess and I'm still nowhere near "good" but I do feel a bit more confident.  Maybe.


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