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Sunday, March 25, 2007

Flamingos and strips

flamingo appliqué

I was racing to get the eyeball sewn onto the Other's flamingo before the sun went down, but I finished around dusk, so once again the photo is pretty washed out. But nevertheless, the quilt top is done! I quite enjoyed the appliqué and will be doing more soon, I'm sure. The bird was supposed to get a wing, as the original design indicates, but the fabrics I had left were going to stand out too much, so the Other and I agreed to skip it. I'm thinking of asking the Mother to give some feathery details to the big body section when she's quilting—we're going to use pink thread, so it'd balance out the eye. I'm so excited to get the quilt top in the mail—fire up the machine, Mother!

why we preshrink


I've also been cutting up strips for my next quilt, Column Inches. I dutifully washed and dried all the fabric before slicing it, and good thing too. Half the fabric shrunk to a couple inches narrower than the other half—the selvage strips in the photo are aligned at the fold. The quilt needs wide strips, which I'll be sewing together and chopping up to insert vertical bars, so it looks like I'll need to add some more aqua strips to the selvage pieces I've cut, since they're only 38 inches wide and need to accommodate several seam allowances (this is another bed-sized quilt). EQ6 isn't really set up for the type of quilt I have in mind, so I can't show you a picture of what I'm thinking—I'm sure my written description could hardly be more confusing. It also means I'm flying blind a little myself; it should be intriguing to let the fabric speak for itself.

strips for the newest quilt

Who knew there were so many shades of aqua fabric? Aqua and green, that is, but only very specific shades of green. I've been collecting these solids from all over the country, along with text prints for the vertical bars. It's about time to empty them all out of my closet. Watch this space to see what the hell I'm on about with this quilt.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

love the flamingo!