Saturday, March 13, 2010

The First Seam

I have actually started sewing this quilt! I sewed one seam!

It was tricky figuring out where I had left off. I had a set of pieces I cut out, but I didn't remember what square they were for! I looked through the design files until I found the correct one. Then I had the challenge of figuring out what square went where. I added numbers to the squares in the design, and then wrote the numbers on surgical tape and stuck the tape to the pieces.

Finally, I sewed my first seam. It joined a couple of the smaller pieces just above the center line of the square and a bit to the right. The pieces were the right size, and I carefully sewed right on the quarter-inch line. But the combined pieces were too short! By about 1/8 inch. So I took the seam out and tried again. Finally, on the 4th try, I got the pieces to end up the correct length.

The Baby Quilt

It's been a long time. My last post was in May of last year, and here it is March.

I went to the Lake FarmPark quilt show again, and bought more fabric. Some nice solid reds, and a pack of nice reddish fat quarters. When Lynn saw them, she put her foot down. "You are stalling long enough! You are going to sew this quilt! And to practice, you are going to finish Joshua's quilt."

Joshua, my grandson, is about a year and a half old. A year ago, we visited him and his mother in Yuma, AZ. (We live in Cleveland, OH.) While we were there, we went geocaching. I entered the coordinates into our GPS. Incorrectly. The coordinates I entered led us to a large flea market -- with a quilt store! Lynn and I both bought fabric. She bought a package meant to be made into a cloth book, with an accompanying wall hanging. Her plan was to make it into a quilt, with the wall hanging making the top half and the pages sewn together to make the bottom half. She bought some pale green fabric that went well with the pastel blues and other colors in the cloth book. She spent an afternoon at Liz's house beginning the quilt, but hadn't touched it since. She told me to figure out a way to finish it and finish it.

So, I've arranged the ten pages of the book, along with ten rectangles cut from the green fabric, into a 4-row, 5-column grid that is about the same size as the wall hanging picture. They're all sewn together. Lynn bought some more fabric, including pale blue with polka dots and pale green with polka dots. I'm going to use the green polka dots as an inner border around this grid, and then sew it to the top half and put a full border around it in the original pale green.