It’s the end of January, and I don’t know about you, but this January in particular has felt interminable. Neverending. What do you mean there’s still a week left?! Wasn’t Christmas three months ago?
At the same time, it feels like it has not been all that long since I last updated this blog on my progress on the three quilts I’m currently working on. Apparently, however, it’s been a while. Sorry.
To tell you the truth, much of the work that I’ve put in on each of the three quilts has come in fits and spurts. Sometimes, I do a whole lot in one day or one weekend and it seems like a good time to write an update. Other times, I plug away at a few things here or there, or I get sidetracked and end up ripping out a bunch of seams, and even if spent the day working, I don’t feel as if I got a ton done. That’s what January has felt like. Progress has been made, but in increments so small that each of them feels too small to merit an update on its own. So now it’s coming to the end of the month, and I now feel like I’ve accomplished enough that there updates to share all around. So here goes.
Update #1: Oregon Waterfall quilt
I sat on this for a long time without doing anything on it. The last thing that needs to be done is some thread work over the top of the puzzle pieces to show the pine branches at the top of the image that give a tremendous amount of depth to the photo. Without those pine branches, the image (and therefore the quilt) is just a lot of rock with a waterfall. The quilt really brings that home because so much of it is in that rock fabric. It desperately needs those pine branches sewn in.
I have been debating how to do them – going back and forth between a zigzag stitch alone against the fabric or a zigzag stitch over little strips of the green fabric. Long before today, I had pretty much settled on doing a combination of the two – some stitching alone, and some on top of green fabric. While trying to figure out how I might implement something on the Hus Ved Havet quilt (more on that later), I discovered a decorative stitch on my sewing machine that is perfect for this particular application. (Until the fall of 2022, I had a 1965 Singer sewing machine that sewed in a straight line and in zigzag stitches but did nothing else. I am still discovering the marvels of decorative stitches. I sometimes forget they’re there.)
And then…a snag. This quilt was constructed by gluing fabric shapes to a muslin background. (Heat N Bond FTW.) I encountered a little of this while I was doing the zigzag stitches over the edges of each fabric shape, but the decorative stitch apparently was too much for the machine. The glue literally gums up the works – I can get a few inches of sewing in – max maybe five – and then something happens and the thread disappears, and I have to rethread the machine and start again. I did that probably about 20 times today, if not more. Eventually, the needle gets glue on it as well, and the whole needle has to be chucked. (Fortunately, I have an extensive stash of machine needles, and the four I went through today didn’t make a dent in it.)
So I got some of it done today, and in general, I like the look and I think it’ll eventually be what I want. But it’s going to take some brainstorming (and maybe a Google search or two) to figure out if there’s any way for me to prevent that from happening. In the meantime, I think this is literally just going to be something I have plug away at over time – an hour here, an hour there.
Here’s what it looks like right now.
I like how the decorative stitches look, but they don’t show up against the rock fabric background. I like how the fabric shows up against the background, but the jury is still out on whether or not it’ll look like I want it to in the end. But it’s close.