Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Return and repeat

I don't think I post too many of my struggles while quilting, and lest my gentle readers think it's 'all good, all the time', I thought I'd share the latest when I tried to attach the final borders to the Dbl Four.

The squares in the pieced border alternate red-brown-red around the quilt. When I decided to sew pieced units into the corners, I made sure the color of those squares continued the pattern, red-brown-red. I sewed the solid red to the pieced border, then laid that next to the quilt.


What the?? Red-brown-brown!!


So I turned it around and laid it against the other side of the quilt. ARGH!! Brown-red-red. How did this happen?? Well without thinking, I sewed the solid red to the pieced borders on the wrong side. Hmmm... what's the *fastest* way to rip 105" x 2?





This is my ripper, which sometimes doubles as a rotary cutter. :) I put a light tension on the seam with my non-dominant hand, tick the blade against the exposed stitch and rip! It goes so fast you wouldn't believe it. In the past I used to pick the seam clean afterward, but now...



I use my sticky lint roller to pick the loose threads for me.
Oh-kay, back to sewing the right side to the correct border, I'm back in business... Only maybe not quite yet.



I've ripped and re-sewn this seam twice.



And I've ripped and re-sewn this seam twice. This was not fun. This was so much like *work* I had to push back and take a deep breath. This is where I left it at bedtime last night. I still have the other border to reconstruct and attach.

And I do this to relax??

2 comments:

Susan said...

Oh, ouch! I've taken the borders (all four of them!) off a king-size quilt twice before finding the right border fabric, so you have my sympathy. Sometimes I wonder if anyone would ever notice our little 'humility errors.'

Your quilt is lovely, so don't give up.

Fiona said...

Go to confess ... if it was me I'd have called it quirky and left it as it was. But I guess if it was going to bug you every time you looked at it ... no alternative but to get the seam ripper out.