Quilting: February 2007 Archives
In the midst of our Tuesday snowfall, I got in my car and headed over to Quiltology for my second quilting class. This class was about preparing the fabric and using our rotary cutting tools. Because of the snow, there were only three of us there with Colette, and it turned out to be a great opportunity to learn how best to use a rotary cutter and just to talk about the state of modern quilting and sewing in general. Really, if you're into quilting or fabric and live in Chicago you should definitely support Colette. She has a lot of good ideas and a great urban sensibility.
The quilt I am working on is called the "Serenity Quilt" and it's a crib or lap-blanket sized quilt. I could have selected my own fabrics, but I loved the blue and green batiks that Colette had already kitted up. Besides, for this project I really wanted to focus on the mechanics of using the sewing machine and understanding how to assemble a quilt. I'll leave the color theory to another project, especially since these colors suit me perfectly.
In spite of the flash photography, the colors of these fabrics are captured quite well. For the blocks in the Serenity quilt, you basically have to cut out two different sized rectangular shapes -- simple, but it definitely took more time than I expected it to. Even so, I have a better appreciation for rotary cutting tools and the 12" x 12" gridded lucite square that I bought to help me with the cutting process.
Serenity's quilt blocks are very simple -- 4 of the larger rectangles and 8 of the smaller ones. Even though I didn't pick out the fabrics, I'll still get to play with figuring out how I want to put them together. I'm thinking that I'll get out my blocking board and some pins and try out some prototypes over the weekend to see what combinations I like best. The block above was one I put together on the spur of the moment to demonstrate what the blocks looked like.
I'm really looking forward to the next class where I get to be back in front of a sewing machine and we get to hear more about the strategies of putting a quilt top together!
For my birthday this year (Monday, in case you were wondering) I treated myself to learning a new craft. You see, there's this awesome new (well, relatively new) quilting store in Lincoln Park, Quiltology. While I never expect sewing or quilting to become my primary craft, I do really really want to get over my current sewing machine anxiety. You can do so many things with woven fabric that just don't work all that well in the knitted medium. Or you can use fabric to provide structure to a knitted item, like a purse or a blanket. And I just love the idea of making a quilt. There are so many fabulous fabrics out there, and there are a lot of shortcuts (like letting people with long-arm quilting machines do the actual quilting) that make a large quilt project something that a dilettante like myself can actually contemplate.
The class I am taking is called "Starting @ Square 1" and it literally starts with an introduction to sewing machines and how to use them, and ends with a simple quilt. Tonight was the first class, so we learned all about how the spiffy Bernina sewing machines at Quiltology work (Quiltology is also a sewing/quilting "workshop" where you can come in and rent time on their spiffy machines if you don't have one of your own). Now, I do have some basic sewing machine know how thanks to my mom, but I wanted someone who could help put some structure around it for me. Believe it or not, it was actually a cool exercise to "sew" on a piece of lined paper without any thread in the machine -- there was no way for me to screw anything up, so I could just play with the speed and get a sense for how the machine behaved.
As it turns out, those Berninas are pretty well behaved machines. I don't think they are quite as nice as my mom's Husqvarna (I thought the bobbin mechanism was a bit fussy) but they are easy to control. And they have a lot of fun electronic features on them. Give a geek girl a digital display and she can be endlessly entertained.
By the end of the class, we'd all stitched without thread on paper, learned how to "turn corners", wound bobbins and threaded the machine and started stitching on some fabric squares that Colette had ready for us to play with . She did a nice job of introducing things without being overbearing or micromanaging. And we got a short tutorial on presser feet and when to use particular kinds of them and also got to try out some of the more specialty stitches programmed into the machine. The class ended with a lesson in cleaning one's machine and a discussion aimed at helping us pick out what we wanted to do for our projects.
One of the nice things about Quiltology -- she has some "premade" quilt kits where the fabrics have already been bundled together (nothing has been cut out or anything like that). While I could have picked my own fabrics, I didn't need to since the Serenity quilt kit already reflected some of the colors I love best in batik prints, which I am always drawn to when I am in a fabric store (just ask my mom). For me, since this adventure is about getting comfortable with sewing and not so much about color selection (at least not yet -- one hurdle at a time) I really don't feel guilty about taking the easy road and letting someone else put together good color combinations for me.
No homework for this class, but since my mom is coming to visit this weekend, it might be time to get out the sewing machine she loaned me and do a little practicing. Next week in class we'll be focusing on rotary cutting, so I don't have any "homework" this week. However, I did buy a copy of Amy Butler's In Stitches
