Friday, June 03, 2005

One more for the Test Piece Collection

Okay, I spent three days on it, and now . . . I hate it! The good news is, it can be counted as a test piece, and I learned a lot. The lessons, some painful and a few not-so-painful, include:

1. Don't fuse too many layers together, as they get hard to quilt through. For future fusing, I must limit myself to two or three layers only.

2. Know in advance the FMQ pattern that will be used. Every unpicked stitch shows, as the cotton does not close back over stitch holes once it has been fused.

3. When working on a black background, use black batting. The white is very obvious if you do have to unpick some FMQ.

4. When properly fused, you can FMQ your butt off, and the fused pieces will not lift. Yippee!

5. Don't try to couch three different bulky novelty yarns down at the same time - take the time to work them in separately, it's worth the effort.

6. Doing an advance sketch is good. Using a design overlay for placing is good. Stopping your design construction half way through because you're bored is bad, and can result in a finished piece that looks like a kindergarten class projectile vomitted crayons onto the design wall.

7. Three days lost to idiocy is not as bad as it could be. I could have made it bigger!

8. The "sketch it on freezer paper, trace it on wax paper, use the freezer paper pieces as templates on the applique shapes, and re-construct it using the wax paper as an overlay guide" method of construction is definately a keeper.

9. Can't think of anything else. Stop the "Lessons learned" segment here.

10. Nope, got one more. Spritzing and quick pressing batting totally works well at getting the wrinkles out - much better than hanging it.

So, in conclusion, I had a fun time wasting three days, so can't really call them wasted. And, if I'm ever in need of a 14" x 16" piece of brightly coloured schlock, I've got one in storage. Now, back to the border of Chris and Rhea's wedding quilt. And knitting a poncho. Because they're "out" now, so I may as well make one. Sigh.


WOMBAT - Waste of materials, brains and time. Posted by Hello

Kind of looks like an octopus playing with a puppy, doesn't it?

5 comments:

Lisa said...

I like the shapes...

Nikki said...

I like the shapes too. Maybe if you tried more variation in value next time? This seems kinda medium-heavy.

I really like the wax paper tracing idea. I've been leaving my freezer paper sketch intact and using more freezer paper to trace templates, but I think I'll try the wax paper next time.

Logan said...

Nikki - yup, the wax paper worked really well. I pinned it along one edge to my background fabric on my ironing surface. I was able to slide pieces around underneath to get them in place, then flip it out of the way to press / fuse the pieces.

You're bang on with the value issue. The fabric I was using was a hand dyed piece with all of those colours in it, but had no value variation in it. If I tried something like this again, I would need to add light values from a different source.

Anonymous said...

Hi! You didn't "waste" your time, you learned some very important lessons! The design has a lot of appeal. Perhaps dividing up the shapes (kind of like fans?) so that you can incorporate more texture? Cheers! A fan, Jeannie

Deb R said...

Me too on liking the shapes. There's some lovely, twisty-organic stuff going on there. It just gets a little lost.

I think you should hang on to your sketches, because I could see you revisiting this idea sometime utilizing the "lessons learned" and coming up with a keeper!