This quilt was a real learning experience...mainly never to do another English paper pieced quilt ever again!
It was great fun to cut and sew all the fussy cut blocks, but tedious to join them all together. Here is the list of minor disasters I encountered on the way...
- I used fabric glue sticks to glue the fabric over the papers - easy-peasy until I realised that they were coming unglued when the blocks were pinned on my design wall for a few months
- so, I had to thread baste all the edges down again before I could stitch the blocks together
- but, some glued bits were too well stuck, which meant I had to pull some of the papers out quite roughly
- and even though I did this as carefully as I could, the stitching suffered
- so that some of the fine threads I'd used snapped or stretched and the stitches began to show
- so I had to do some seam repair work as I got ready to hand quilt.
- but the fabric in the blocks was so busy that it was hard to see the quilting design lines, so I succumbed to using the hated washable blue marker
- but horror of horrors, when I dampened the blocks to remove the blue pen, the bright red fabric ran into the white sashings.
- and as I was away from home at the time, I had to wait two weeks before I could throw the quilt in the washing machine with a box of 'colour catchers'
- but amazingly this removed the red dye from the white fabric and saved the day...(I love colour catchers!)
By this point I was sick of the whole thing, so I decided to machine quilt rather than hand quilt. Somehow, washing the quilt and machine quilting tightened up all those loose stitches, so that the ugly piecing seems to have disappeared and I now have a quilt that I actually like in the end...
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