Ugh - the only thing worse than Monday morning is Monday morning with a hangover. The Dread Reverend and I stayed up till some obscene hour last night drinking rum and playing poker - well, he was teaching me to play poker, I'd never played before. Now I'm paying for it with a whopping headache. Work ought to be interesting today.
So, the quilt adventure yesterday. Silly me - I thought quilting was a piece of cake, albeit cut with very precise corners. Yesterday was enlightening.
The first thing I decided to do, after getting the quilt all pinned together, was quilt around the "JRRT" and ring symbols in the middle. Not thinking this through, I attached the 'walking foot' to the machine, folded up the side of my quilt, and slid it into place. So far so good ... till I got to the first turn in that design. I made it all the way down one side before I realized that was just stupid ... having to constantly stop and turn, moving that whole quilt around, was never going to cut it.
I knew what freehand quilting was, I even tried it once, long ago, on a scrap quilt square made just for that purpose. Freehand quilting is when you drop the feed dogs so nothing is moving the material in any direction, and in my case I had to remove the presser foot entirely since I didn't have one that would work for this purpose. Then, as you press the foot pedal and begin to sew, you have to move the material around manually to determine the size of the stitches and where they go. The good thing about this is that you can stitch in any direction at any time, just by moving the material in the direction you want to go.
The bad news is, it's freaking hard. It takes a lot of skill, I can tell you. By the time I got all the way around the "JRRT" symbol and both sides of the ring, I was just starting to have an idea that I might some day get the hang of it. There is some pretty wobbly stitching around those designs, and it's not pretty work.
But I did get through it, and that part is done. I should have practiced more before trying it on the quilt, but I've pretty much already decided this quilt itself is going to be the 'practice,' and it's going to be a 'utility quilt' - or a utiliquilt, if you will. It'll be the one that gets dragged out in the yard in the summer, and whatnot ... so using it for practice is okay. Besides, after 10 years, I'm kind of sick of it and just want to get it put together in some useable fashion.
Next I'm just straight stitching around the larger outer square, then in all the seam lines. After that I'll get to the blocks.
The blocks are going to be interesting. I have no quilting lines marked on them yet. In fact, that's the reason I put the thing away for so many years and quit working on it ... I couldn't find a method I liked to transfer the designs onto the fabric, and gave up in frustration for a long time.
Initially I wanted to create my own quilting designs for the squares, something with a Tolkienish flavor. I tried cutting out my own template - that was a minor disaster. I don't have that kind of patience. Then I tried drawing a design in black Sharpie on a piece of paper, then using my light box to trace the design onto a square. That would have worked on the light colored squares, except that I couldn't seem to find any kind of marking pencil I was happy with.
But nothing at all worked on the dark squares. Those are dark green with a busy light green flower print. The stupidest material to pick if you want to draw on it. Dark pencil doesn't show up in the dark green, and light doesn't show up in the light green.
When I decided to go back to work on it, I decided I was going to put it all together, get the basic quilting in the seams done, then decide what to do about the blocks. I figured having the whole thing together might inspire me to come up with something, finally, for the blocks.
I bought a disappearing ink marker for the light squares. I love those things - they really work. They have a nice, sharp tip for precise lines, and they really do disappear in a few hours. So you can't mark an entire quilt in advance with them, but you can mark one square at a time, just as you're getting ready to quilt it.
I still don't know what I'm going to do for the dark squares. If they had white disappearing ink markers, that would be grand, but all I saw were purple and blue. I wonder if I can mark my quilting design on some type of paper or stabilizer or something, quilt right through it, then tear it away. That's probably common knowledge to 'real' quilters, but me, just learning, I don't know about those things yet. I guess I'll be finding out.
The story behind the quilt. In 1995 I joined an online group comprised of Lord of the Rings and Tolkien fans. We exchanged email, and met every Sunday evening in a chat room, discussing Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, and life in general. The following year we decided we'd like to meet in person, so about 8 or 9 of us made a trip to the Oregon coast, where we rented cottages and hung out for a week. It sounds weird, but it was a blast ... I'd never had so much fun in my life. I laughed so hard the whole week, my sides and stomach actually hurt by about Thursday.
Anyway, I came home so jazzed that I decided to make a Tolkien quilt. But due to many and varied difficulties, it kept languishing, never getting finished. Sometimes I'd get it out for awhile, but never really make any progress, and then put it away again. Now, 10 1/2 years later, I'm finally finishing it.
I love the "JRRT" and ring applique in the center. I'm still surprised at what a good job I did on that. I had to draw the "JRRT" out freehand on a piece of poster board to make the template. The applique went pretty well, too. That was my first attempt at applique, and it must have been dumb beginner's luck, because I've tried applique since then, and gave up, pounding my head on the wall in frustration.
However, I don't know what I was thinking with the rest of the quilt. It seems rather boring to me now. I think I left the rest of the quilt design simple, with nothing but large squares, because I had in mind to quilt (or possibly embroider) fancy designs in each - so the 'fanciness' would come from the embellishment, not from the quilt design itself. I've long since forgotten whatever ideas I had in that direction. I've designed two motifs, one for the light squares, one for the dark squares. I may still use those, or I may rethink the whole thing and decide to do something different. I'll make it up as I go along, I guess.
What prompted me to finally get it done is this insanity of the Book of Kells quilt. I really wanted to make that, but didn't want to start another quilt when I had two unfinished ones. I also thought that, even though it was going to be complex and I knew I had limited experience with quilting, with enough patience, I could still manage it. I can see it's going to be quite a challenge. It'll be interesting.
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