Some Good Sewing Advice

Here's something a little different to brighten your day!  A friend found it somewhere on Facebook:

It's funny, because I perfectly agreed with the first paragraph.  I think "Good results are difficult when indifference predominates," is exactly right.  Even the beginning of the second paragraph made sense - "When there are urgent housekeeping chores, do these first so your mind is free to enjoy your sewing."

But after that I lost it!  I don't know how many times I've answered the door covered in bits of thread!  And I have no idea why you'd want to get French chalk all over your fabric.

This newspaper clipping is old and yellowed, but even when it was printed, however long ago, they clearly thought this advice was already funny.  I hope you did too!

Piecing the Snowball Blocks

As I mentioned yesterday, I decided to scale down the snowball blocks for my Hen Party quilt to 6" finished.  When I looked around I found snowball blocks made with different sizes of corner triangles.  I like the block best when the corners are 1/4 of the size of the block, so I needed 1.5" corner triangles.

The block is easy to make.  I cut a great many 2" squares, which is 1.5" plus the seam allowances on both sides.  I drew a diagonal line from corner to corner, and pinned all four corners to the block at once:

Then I sewed right around the block, stitching on the lines, in one pass.  After all the blocks were sewn I went back and trimmed all the seam allowances down to 1/4 inch.

Some people will recommend that you don't trim the seam allowances here, but just iron up the corners so that there are 3 layers of fabric.  I tried it, and it does help to keep the block square.  However, I really wanted to be able to iron the seam allowances towards the dark fabric, so I opted to trim off the excess.  I was glad that I did it, too, because the blocks nested together beautifully when it came time to assemble them.

There is no doubt, though, that keeping these blocks square when you are ironing them is the biggest challenge. I was finally able to use the mini iron and Steady Betty pressing surface that I bought from Keepsake Quilting a few months ago:

I had my doubts about these when I first got them, but they turned out to be very helpful.  The Steady Betty pressing surface is covered with thin foam, which clings to the block.  It also drags a bit on the iron, which is a drawback, but not a huge one.  So it helps keep the blocks square when you iron them.

The mini iron is also great.  It gets very hot, so I was able to just let the heat do the work rather than using a lot of muscle.  Because it is so easy to handle, I didn't burn my fingers once!  And because the iron is very lightweight, I was able to press all those corners while seated, which is another bonus.

Tomorrow I'll show you the borders!

New Project - Hen Party

Today is my mom's 75th birthday!  Part of the reason my blog posts have been scarce recently is because I've been secretly working on her birthday present.  It's a lap quilt, although once the borders are added it will be up to 70" square.  Here's the centre:

I wanted to get the whole top done before today, but I didn't quite make it.  The borders are done but not sewn on.  I hope to get it all assembled by the end of the week.  I make no promises on when it will be quilted...

I got the idea for the quilt from a pattern in the last issue of Sew Scrappy magazine, which I reviewed back in January.  I have modified it so much that I think you can call the design original now.

The quilt in the magazine used 8" snowball blocks, but when I looked at the scale of my fabrics I thought that 6" blocks would be better.  You can see that the larger chickens are framed perfectly.  There was a LOT of fussy cutting!  Even the smaller chickens were fussy cut so that no heads were cut off, although there is one block where I couldn't avoid it.  I will try to do less of that in future!

My original plan was to do the corner triangles in black and white.  I worried though, that such a strong contrast might distract from the chickens, so I opted instead for brown and cream.  The contrast is still strong, but they blend quite well with the other fabrics.  So I am happy with that choice.

I'll show you the construction over the next few days, and hopefully by the end the top will be finished too!


Related Post:

Sew Scrappy Review