I certainly needed something bright and cheery, since it RAINED FOR 5 DAYS. Seriously, there is not enough Prozac in the world to combat that, especially when the smallest member of your household asks you every five minutes to take her to the playground. Sorry, honey. We have to stay inside all day because GOD HATES US ALL.
So, it was clearly a fit of weather-induced depression that I decided to make good on my threat to try to make a Lone Star out of a Moda jelly roll.
Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
I honestly thought that, having worked with diamonds before, that the strip piecing method would actually be easier. I also thought that I had somehow figured out how to arrange the strips in some magic moment of clarity that didn't involve actually reading anything or even, apparently, looking at a picture of one of these quilts. Once I realized that I was TOTALLY wrong, I decided to forge ahead, since I had already sewn 3 strip sets together.
I was pretty confident that I was cutting on a good 45-degree angle, and I was careful to recalibrate every few cuts. But then came sewing the cut strip sets together.
Obviously there were several false starts as I realized that you can't match up the seams at the edge and still have them line up at the seam line itself. I managed to figure that out, but nothing lined up properly at all, as though everything had been cut and sewn inaccurately. WHICH IT HAD NOT.
Consequently, my diamond was sort of...curvy.
It was supposed to be 5 rows, but after I realized I was making something from another dimension, I said screw it and scrapped the project. I mean, I do have a certain stock in trade with bad sewing, but even I have limits.
Next: pinwheels!
3 comments:
I watched people taking Jan Krentz's lone star class at Asilomar this summer and they all spent a LOT of time pressing and starching their diamonds into the right shape -- so don't feel you're not up to it! I think the table runner looks great.
Your table runner is beautiful! I'm sure its great for chasing away the rainy day blues.
Question for you, do you hand sew your binding to the back? I'm just curious, because some do, some don't. I'm a doer - just for the relaxing time it takes.
I do hand sew the binding, and I rather enjoy the process now (though I didn't at first). When I posted my mock binding tutorial last year, a lot of people told me that they do it all by machine, but that just always seemed fraught with peril to me. I even saw instructions for it in a quilting magazine recently, but I still decided that hand sewing was that method I was least likely to totally screw up.
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