She made an all-over stippling design in white thread. She asked me whether I know about squaring up the borders of a quilt to avoid wavy binding. I told her, "Of course I do!"
Then I stopped to think that maybe there was more to it than I might think, and given how the whole project was going, I could use a (another?) lesson in squaring up the borders. I did a Google search on squaring up a quilt, and picked the first video that came up. It was this one, by Aimee Griffin of OverallQuilter.com
I was so excited when I saw it was Aimee because I knew then I would at least understand what she was telling me. (I'm beginning to lose so much sewing self-confidence on this "quick" baby quilt project that I am wondering if I am even qualified for a "Quilting for Dummies" book. I need "Quilting for the Hopelessly Scatterbrained and Clueless.") Her suggestion of using two different rulers (a square and a long ruler) was very helpful. I also had not thought of lining up the ruler with the interior border, before. I am so glad I found this video, because Aimee is an excellent teacher. I took her foundation strip paper piecing class based on the Peggy Martin technique a year or so ago. Hopefully now I won't have a wavy binding. I think I may have been so clueless before Cindy's suggestion to find a video that wavy binding wasn't even something I had ever noticed.
I even made a cute little label out of muslin and purple rick-rack, based on the tutorial I found at the Etsy How-Tuesday blog. For future projects, I may put the rick-rack on later in the creative process. This time I attached the rick rack to the muslin first, and then whip-stitched it to the back. It was hard to peel back the rick-rack and avoid stitching through it. I also tried their freezer-paper stiffener trick. I recommend this technique, but only if you are using a single thickness of fabric attached to the freezer paper. I had a double thickness, and it kept jumping around and moving as I wrote on the top. Also, be careful peeling the freezer paper off the back, because the edges frayed a tiny bit when I peeled a little too vigorously.
But wait, there's more!
Last night I cut out the bias binding strips. This time I made them 2.25" wide instead of 2" wide. I carefully stitched the strips together and sewed it onto the quilt. I even got the binding ends joined together with a minimum of effort. "I'm really getting the hang of this," I thought. Pride goes before the fall, right? I went to press the seam and pulled the binding around to the back. I couldn't figure out why it went so far around, why the fabric sandwich didn't fill out the binding. Suddenly, I realized that I meant to do double-fold binding, but had, instead, only sewn it as if it were single-fold binding. At that point I gave up and went to bed.
This morning, after a night of reflection followed by a consultation with my mother, I did not pick off the binding. I am carefully folding the edges and then stitching over top of it again. My DH pointed out that this "quick" project is taking me more effort and time than the birth of my friend's child will probably take. I swear this project is cursed. I am wondering if I should take the dratted thing down to church and ask one of the priests to bless it for me. Can quilts be blessed? Do they need exorcisms? But what if it is cursed with an inept sewist, not demons?
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