Sunday, March 23, 2014

I’ve done this sequence so many times today I’m sick of it, but I am making progress.

I’m tracing a small template onto my quilt. The question though for each block is, “Will my Frixion pen leave lines?”. If I think there is a chance of that happening I switch to a chalk stick to do my tracing. You might wonder why I don’t have samples to test. For the first part of the day I couldn’t find my fabric scraps so used chalk whenever there was any doubt. After I found the fabric I was able to do a small test line and that sped up the decision making.

My sewing today is free-motion, but even with a traced template I’m not terribly precise. I think it is a good thing this quilt is called Wonky Stars!

Knotting the ends and hiding them in the layers takes so much time and is, quite frankly, very boring. My machine will do an automatic knot, but I find it leaves a bit of a mess on the back of the quilt. I know how to do a quick quilters knot, but when I work with light and dark fabric together I have a hard time getting the knot tight enough to bury well. Mostly I’ve gone back to a manual knot, except for the times when my machine seems to knot up whether or not I want it to.

The steam is to remove the lines from the Frixion pen. I heard one quilter say she just throws her quilt in the drier to get rid of the lines, but that doesn’t seem to work well for me. Perhaps my drier doesn’t get hot enough. Even this is a challenge because for the blocks that have chalk markings I don’t want to steam the chalk into the fabric. I wondered this afternoon if those small steam irons (for travelling) would remove the Frixion lines. Perhaps I’ll see if the Economy Shop has one and I can give it a try.

The afternoon is half-gone. I’ll change my thread colour and get started on the final twenty or so stars that needed to be sewn. Things are still looking favourable for a finish tomorrow.