I don't know if I washed the fabrics wrong, somehow, or ironed them wrong, or if they came that way from the factory, but the fabric is horribly off-grain. I ended up ripping the fabric half the time, because that at least gave me a straight edge, but this caused more problems downstream. Because of trying to straighten the edges, I ended up like the proverbial table with one leg too long that ends up sitting on the floor as the owner tries to even the legs out. The fabrics weren't long enough any more to meet my design as I had originally drafted it.
Then I also noticed that I had made the top design too wide to meet the requirements of the person who will be doing the long-arm-quilting on it. (She needs the batting and back 4" bigger on all sides.) So I had to redo the design, to make it both shorter and thinner. It didn't get smaller in a proportionally even way, though, unfortunately. Now I am disappointed that there aren't squares on the sides, just rectangles, which are too narrow sometimes to show a whole design element. (I am a bit obsessive about symmetry, sometimes.) Here is what I ended up with:
I finally finished the top, and went to start the back. Well, the kids were playing in my sewing room today. Between climbing over their activities, somehow the numbers got mixed up in my head between the ironing board and the rotary mat. I sewed the backing together, and went to measure it, and realized: now instead of being just the right width and height, it was too wide and still too short.
At this point, I was NOT going to going to take the fabric apart and put in a panel, because I didn't want to have to cut more fabric or find the middle of the length any more. So, I tacked on some strips of 4" wide lengths of scraps at the bottom and top. I figured that would get me through the long-arm-quilting process, and I could just chop them off later when I went to do the binding.
Wrong! The long-arm-quilter (with whom I had been corresponding by email this afternoon to set up a time for me to deliver it to her) gently reminded me that I needed to factor in more than the 4" for takeup as things get quilted. Forehead slap!
No problem, I thought. I pulled up my Big Girl socks and figured out the math of how much I needed to insert into the back to make it tall enough. Then I made a strip of coordinating fabric (thankfully I had plenty left) to insert into the quilt back. I carefully folded the quilt back to fit my cutting board, placed my ruler, and sliced away with my rotary cutter with a brand new blade. I unfolded it and realized: I had cut it into three pieces, not two. At that point I called my mother to commiserate, because I was ready to ball it up and stuff it in the back of the closet. My friend would be none the wiser, right? She doesn't read this blog. I could just send a cute outfit, right? Who was I fooling? Certainly not myself. There was the pesky point of me having just committed to taking the quilt sandwich to be machine quilted, and I am one to honor my commitments. I sewed the first strip in between two of the remnants, and then cut out another strip to bind up the mistaken cut.
On the bright side, despite all my repairs to fix mistakes done while repairing previous mistakes, it has actually turned out for the better. When it first started out, it looked like someone had randomly sewn a random strip of fabric up the middle of the quilt back. Now it truly looks just plain random. I feel like I am in some sort of disappearing nine-patch or mystery quilt-along.
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