Monday, February 26, 2007

Nothing like waiting til the last minute...

Let's back up... to 2 years ago. About January 2005. I saw a Simply Quilts episode with Rita Hutchins and her Totally Tubular Quilts method. I really enjoyed it and figured, shucks, I can do that! And I did, without buying the book. :P

I created the top you see - I think it only took about 2 weeks. It was when I first got my Bernina. I was so excited to be using my "new" sewing machine! Then the top got put away. I pulled it out long enough to take a picture of it for the quilt show registration deadline in January, and then I tossed it on the back of the couch... and didn't touch it until last Tuesday.

Then the panic starts to hit me, I basically have 3.5 days to get this baby finished and quilted! Eeeeeeeeeeeeeh!

Tuesday: put on the borders, after sewing around the top to stabilize the edge. The whole thing is on a bias, so very easy to stretch.

Wednesday: pieced the backing and pinned that poor quilt to death. I used 200 safety pins. The whole bias factor made me kinda nervous.

Thursday: started to quilt it! Loopies and stars were the plan.

About half way through the quilting, I accidentally crossed two loopies on top of each other. I knew I couldn't live with myself if I left it in, so I pulled it off the machine to rip it out... and discovered a bigger problem. :P

I had done it again, I unknowingly folded the backing over and sewed it down. It's not the first time and I'm sure it won't be the last. That took a little while to finish. Definitely started to feel the crunch of time.

Late Thursday night I get the binding sewed on and the excess trimmed off. I started to sew it down, but it was 11pm and my husband wanted to go to bed. I joined him because I knew if I stayed up, I'd just badly disturb his sleep whenever I did go to bed. Not everybody can sleep like the dead... like me. ;)

Friday morning the panic really starts to set it. I thought it'd take me 3 hours to sew down the binding... but it took 4!


Close up of the quilting.


Then I had to put on a sleeve. Something I have never done. *gulp* It took me one hour just to handstitch the sleeve on the rainbow quilt. I still had 2 other quilts to do, and they were bigger and I only had one hour left. I had to resist the urge to cry... then I had a lightbulb moment, I'll just safety pin the other sleeves on! It worked, they were both done in 45 minutes.

And I got all three quilts safely delivered in time. Whew! I'll tell you about the other two quilts in my next post. :)

Leah

4 comments:

Patti said...

It's a beautiful quilt. Congratulations on participation in your first show. It's lots of fun, isn't it, to see your quilt displayed beautifully like that.

Quilts And Pieces said...

Some tense days and hours but it turned out wonderful!

QuiltingFitzy said...

My, my...you're WAY ahead of me girlfriend!

That quilt is just lovely!

Anonymous said...

Wow! look at your rainbow quilt while moving the page up and down. Makes you crosseyed.

Just found your blog today, really enjoyed reading it.