Tutorial: Patches

So, my recently completed Cheery Squares quilt had a slight flaw. Upon washing the quilt, I noticed that a couple of the squares weren't exactly sewn with a proper quarter inch seam allowance- more like a three threads' width allowance. And after washing, those squares started to fray.

What a pain, what a bummer...

This is the first quilt I'm selling too, so there was no way I was going to give it over with mistakes in it. So I took to the internet, and looked up ways to patch quilts. Georgia Leigh has a good tutorial, but I modified it a little bit for my quilt. 

To start off, I measured the two squares in question and made a paper template of the exact size.

Next, you'll want to cut a square of fabric at least a quarter inch larger than your template on all four sides. I didn't have any extra fabric scraps from the quilt, but I did have a lot of small squares left over. It made for small seam allowances, but it worked. 

Press the sides around the template with your handy dandy iron, then remove the paper template.

Perfect little square! I pressed it a lot with the iron because of the very small seam allowances. And to be extra safe, I cut a piece of fusible and ironed it on to keep everything together.

Huzzah! Tiny patches!

I laid the patches out on the quilt where they were going to go- I was going to sew them straight on top of the messed up squares. But I didn't like how it looked- you could definitely tell that it was patched, it was layered and 3D and terrible. So I ended up completely removing the frayed squares and hand sewing the patches on.

Looks like it was meant to be there!

Overall, I think it was a very successful endeavor into repairing a quilt. If you have any suggestions to improve the process, leave me a comment! Thanks!

A Wonderful Finish

Today, I finished the final stitches on the Cheery Squares quilt! I also just got a new camera in the mail today (Fujifilm x20!!) and took both new things to the park for a photoshoot.

I'm so excited to finish this up and to give it to its new owner. I was racing the clock on this one, since this quilt's recipient is going to be born in like 3 weeks. I hope that it is well loved :)

The quilting turned out beautiful too- the daisies add to the quilt nicely :)

And now I can move on to another project!

Finally free motion quilting

I finally took a trip to Ball Mart and bought the cahones I needed to start quilting the cheery squares quilt. I had a couple shaky starts, so I developed a system to quilt beautifully.

1. Find wax paper

2. Pin a piece of wax paper to the quilt

3. Draw pattern onto wax paper

4. Quilt on top of drawing

5. Peel off paper

6. ???

7. Profit!

I feel so sneaky and so happy because it's WORKING!! I'm free motion quilting!!

Finished it Up Friday

What I love about the quilting community is the creativity that everyone has. I love scrolling through photos on Fridays and seeing all of the beautiful things that everyone has made during the week. It gives me inspiration and makes me proud of everyone, because we all know that the craft we chose is not the easiest.

I am very proud to announce that I have a finish this Friday. It's not a quilty finish, but it is the end product of months of hard work, late nights, and physical labor. And now that it is finished, I can finally get back to quilting!

This year in school, I was part of the design/buildLAB. We worked together as a group of 17 to design and build a pedestrian bridge in Clifton Forge, VA. We conducted interviews with townspeople to assess the needs, we spent very late nights making the construction documents, and we fabricated every piece of this bridge ourselves- cutting and welding steel, electrical wiring, and planing and routing the wood. There is a little piece of all 17 of us in this bridge, in the design, and in the hard work that went into it.

My big contribution was the stairs. Another boy and I worked together to design them :)

It's a little early right now, so my brain isn't working very well, but if you have any questions about my project, feel free to ask!

The supports for the bridge, and the cladding under the bridge

Our happy family!

Now I can FINALLY catch up on my Sister's Ten BOM blocks! I'm way behind, I only got one of May's done and I haven't touched June... sad face.

A Hiatus

To all five of you who read my blog, I apologize for my lack of a quilty life as of late. Because of the semester ending, the bridge project NOT ending, and general end of the school year business, I have no time to
A. quilt or
B. blog about quilting.

It's a sad, sad life. I did knock out ONE of the blocks for the Gen X BOM, but haven't had time to finish the other. I even took photos with my faux chenille blanket, but Flash hasn't given them to me, so I don't have those to post either.

I honestly don't anticipate being able to quilt much until the bridge project is finished. It's progressing nicely now, after a lot of hold ups because our steel wasn't delivered on time, but it is still taking a long time to get everything put together.

I do have the Cheery Squares baby quilt to finish, and a BOM block to finish, and I had an idea for a new quilt, so hopefully I can get the ball rolling on those soon. But I'm doing construction from 9-5 now, plus I'm going on vacation to Disney World on May 20-24 (I KNOW RIGHT, IT'S GONNA BE AWESOME), so my blog will not see much action probably until June.

For those of you that I am disappointing, I am very very sorry. For those of you who don't really care, well, fine, whatever. And for those of you who will miss me, here is a photo of me dressed in welding gear.

Welding is a sexy business.

QUILT ON, MY SISTERS. 

Finish it up Friday, FINALLY.

It's been forever since my last post, life just got in the way. The bridge project continues to be set back- we had a huge fiasco this week where, apparently, our drawings were uglier than a pile of poop and therefore unusable, so I pulled a VERY late night on Wednesday to get them reorganized. Oh yeah, and I picked Flash up from the airport on Tuesday.

HE'S HOME HE'S HOME HE'S FINALLY HOME SWEET JESUS I'M VERY HAPPY.

We went to the park on Wednesday to watch the sun set together.

Also, his mustache did not come home with him, which was a surprise.

These past couple of weeks, while school has been a freaking nightmare, I worked on a faux chenille blanket. There are a TON of tutorials online, but Moda recently featured one on their bakeshop website.

Back in November, I bought two yards of a great flannel print- it has mooses and bears and other wonderful woodland things on it. I knew I wanted to make a sweet blanket with it, but didn't really know where to start. But I realized two weeks ago that I wanted to make this faux chenille, so I bought more flannel and got sewing.

It took like a week to sew all the lines on it, but that's because I didn't have much patience.

BUT HERE IT IS ITS FINISHED.

I'm quite chuffed with how it turned out.

Nice and fuzzy :)

Ripples!

In the process of washing and drying, though, the blanket warped a bit. You can tell it's longer at some corners. But honestly, it's going to keep me warm just as well as if it weren't warped, so I'm ok with it.

Essentially, you sew 4 or 5 layers of fabric together with straight lines. It has to be on the diagonal, or it won't fray. Once the entire sandwich is quilted, you cut the top 3 or 4 layers between the lines. Then, you wash it and dry it, and it magically gets soft and beautiful! I completely filled up my lint trap doing this, which made me laugh.

But it's exactly what I needed: something quick, easy, mindless, and calming, in order to make it through the last two weeks of a long distance relationship and a crazy time in school.

Linking up to Finish it Up Friday!

PANIC

I woke up this morning and said to myself, "Couch, you are going to quilt that baby quilt today. TODAY IS THE DAY." I ate a big breakfast, pumped myself up, and sat down at my machine to practice the pattern I was going to use.

I was thinking of quilting small daisies, to go along with the floral theme of the quilt. But once I sat down and tried free motion quilting for the first time, fear grew in my heart and everything I did looked awful. Then I saw Cluck Cluck Sew's quilting flowers post, and she made it look much simpler and less scary. So I practiced today on a piece of scrap fabric with a minky back, and it turned out fine.

getting better!

Why minky, you ask? I'm using minky on the back of the cheery squares quilt. So I need to make sure that I can quilt with it, you know? My practice went fine, but I noticed that there was some fuzz peeking out from the stitching. I dismissed it, and prepared the quilt to be loaded onto the table.

Lookin' good, quilt!

AND THEN EVERYTHING WENT HORRIBLY WRONG.

I don't know why! But whenever I sewed, the backing fabric got pulled up to the front of the fabric. Hot pink fuzz all over the cream colored border. I changed the tension setting on my machine, I got a thinner needle, I tried using my walking foot instead of the free motion foot. BUT NOTHING HELPED.

SO MUCH FUZZ.

I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm at least going to ask the friend who this is going to whether she likes it or not. If she does, then I'll just have to be extra careful with my stitching (because now, every move I make is painfully obvious). If she doesn't, well, then I need some major help.

This didn't happen with the other minky quilts I've done. But then again, I wasn't trying to sew white cotton to hot pink minky. GAAHH