I've given myself a deadline of Easter to have the monsters' ruffled quilt completed and I don't want to jinx myself but I think I might just make it by the end of that weekend (only 12 days from now - must keep telling myself its do-able!).
You may recall from previous posts that I was worried I might not have enough reclaimed fabric to be do the quilt - I was contemplating a shopping trip for more fabric. The monster and I ended up going to the local red cross op-shop a couple of weekends ago and picked up some fantastically cheap sheets and fabrics that are now destined for the quilt.
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| Samples of the fabric I already had on hand - from the stash and reclaimed from old clothes. I'm really not sure about the blue and burgundy fabrics at the top of the pile |
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| The op-shop fabric for the quilt top I adore the bright blue floral fabric. I think its really going to liven up the quilt. |
So last week I cut all 63 of the required 21x10.5 inch rectangles of fabric for the quilt top and an equal number of 10.5 inch squares from a plain cream sheet. (The squares get stitched to the back of each quilt piece once ruffled to hold everything in shape.)
Over the weekend I ruffled all 63 top pieces - what a mission - because I'm using a lot of repurposed fabrics and the textures, thickness etc are not consistent like they would be if I used all new quilting fabrics, I had to constantly adjust the thread tension and stitch lengths. I also spent quite a lot of time rethreading the machine and detangling threads. It went a lot quicker with the ruffler foot on the Brother than if I had tried hand ruffling, but it still felt like a laborious task.
Every evening so far this week I've spent an hour or 2 attaching the cream squares to the backs of the ruffled pieces. If I keep up this pace, I should have all the top pieces ready to be arranged and sewn together by either this weekend or early next week.
After that its just working out what to do with the quilt back, sandwiching, quilting and binding then I'm done...definitely do-able by my self imposed deadline right??
While I've been doing all this cutting, ruffling and sewing the monster has been wanting to be involved. She spent a couple of evenings arranging and rearranging pieces to find a pattern/colour layout that she likes best. She even got to the point of deciding on a layout for each row and putting the pieces for each row in individual sandwich bags (1 bag per row) so I wouldn't get the order mixed up. Since then she's decided that there really isn't enough bright colours and definitely not enough purple in the quilt for her liking. I have to agree with her on this point, when she laid all the pieces out, with the exception of the occasional bright blue floral and the white and royal purple print pieces, it was a bit pastel and dull. So I've been to Spotlight and bought a few pieces of really bright, very purple fabric (yeah, more fabric - I must be up to about a million metres of fabric on this quilt now!).
Once I've got the majority of the pieces that are already ruffled sewn to their backing pieces I'll cut and sew a few pieces of each of the new purples to add into the mix. If I end up with too many pieces ruffled and sewn to backing pieces I'll just use the excess for either an accent on the quilt back, or a couple of matching throw cushions or pillow cases.
So back to sewing for now. Hopefully another update with some progress pics over the weekend.
K
BTW Have you seen the new Pinterest widget on the right hand side of the blog?
I've found craftgawker.com over the last week and have been pinning tonnes of stuff - what an amazing site to lose lots of hours to. Now you can see what's been catching my eye right here in the blog (or you can follow my Pinterest boards).
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