Author Archives: Jennifer

Can’t Seem to Finish That Quilt

None of these quilts are finished.

Like many quilters, I have an abundance of unfinished quilting projects. I feel really bad about this state of affairs. Guilt about unfinished projects even robs me of enthusiasm for starting a new project and often leaves me stuck not working on any quilt. We quilters inevitably laugh the problem off, even making jokes about how many unfinished projects we have, although I’m sure we all want to find a way to finish our quilts. Let’s take a look at some of the causes for quilt-procrastination and think about what can be done:
• Lack of motivation: Quilting is a time-consuming and often challenging hobby, so it’s important to have a strong motivation to finish each project. If you’re not feeling motivated, it can be hard to muster the energy to complete a quilt. The best way I’ve found to re-kindle motivation on a lagging project is to hang whatever you have done so far on a wall, take a step back and really appreciate what you have accomplished to date. Try to envision how beautiful it will be when it’s fully done. This simple technique always lights a spark under my sewing needle.
• Perfectionism: Quilters tend to be a very precise lot and often strive for perfection in their work, but this can be a double-edged sword. If you’re constantly trying to be perfect, you may endlessly agonize over the smallest detail and drag the production time out to eternity. Try to remind yourself that imperfections are part of the beauty and uniqueness of handmade quilts.
• Lack of time: Quilting can be time-consuming, which is especially problematic if you also have a job or kids, or both! Try breaking your quilting projects into smaller, more manageable steps that you can work on a little bit at a time. This can help you make progress even if you only have a few minutes here and there. Be sure to keep all the parts for one project together in a bag or storage container so you don’t waste valuable project time searching for your quilt parts.
• Overcommitment: If you have too many quilting projects going on at once, it can be overwhelming and make it difficult to finish any of them. It would be easy to say, “Limit yourself to one or two projects at a time”, but all quilters know that is near impossible. I find it more realistic to try to finish ONE thing from your unfinished projects pile before bringing something new into the queue.
Remember that quilting should be a fun and rewarding hobby, so try not to get too bogged down in the details. If you’re struggling to finish a quilt, take a step back and evaluate why you’re struggling, then try to make some adjustments to help you move forward.

What to Do with an Ugly Quilt

Regrets. I have a few.

When it comes to quilting, I’m more of a Process Quilter. I’m really good at the mechanics: cutting, piecing, matching points, sewing and the like. The aspect of quilting that I struggle with is color selection. Many times, I’ll “cheat” and simply chose a handful of colors all from the same line. They are pretty much guaranteed to match, but when I strike out on my own, there can be disastrous results. Aside from gifting the quilt to someone you don’t like, what should you do if you’ve inadvertently created a monster? Here are some ideas:

  • Add a Border, A Really BIG One – Presuming you haven’t quilted and bound the beast yet, you can create new interest and even distract from some negative things going on in the quilt by replacing the existing border with a different fabric or adding a new, really big border. I’m thinking 10” or more.
  • Cut It Up – I know, cutting up a quilt may be anathema to some quilting devotees, but you really haven’t had time to bond with this quilt yet and it is truly hideous. You could make piles and piles of potholders by cutting the quilt into 8” squares then binding them. Now you have emergency holiday gifts! If the quilt has some good parts, you could go a little larger and make a table runner and placemats.
  • Repurpose – I was once gifted an enormous, purple Crazy Quilt as a wedding gift. It was considerably ugly, but I did think it was nice that the maker knew I liked purple, and she definitely stuck to that theme. Color aside, it had some other problems: it was too small for our king-sized bed and, on top of that, it was unbelievably heavy. I think the batting was in fact a bunch of old blankets. Whatever was in there, if you tried to use this quilt it felt like lying under the leaded blanket at the dentist. As a result of these numerous issues, it never made it as a bed quilt. We ended up using it as a couch cover for a couple years and then we later moved, we used it as a moving blanket to protect furniture. It’s been over 30 years and I still use the quilt for moving furniture so you could say the quilt ended up having a well-loved life after all.
  • Embrace It – Maybe it will grow on you? You could always just turn it over.
  • Gift It – Someone you know has to love puce, orange and hot pink, right?
  • Use It Ironically – Tell everyone you made it and be really proud of that fact. No one will have the heart to tell you that its actually ugly.
  • Donate It – It might end up as a dog blanket, but at least you won’t have to look at it anymore.

 

Good Uses for a Lifetime of Fabric

I still don’t have what I need

I currently have more fabric than I could ever use in my lifetime, yet I’m still buying more. This causes me to wonder more than a little, “What is going to happen to all of this fabric after I’m gone?”. When a quilter passes on, her well-meaning relatives are left to deal with her stash. Sadly, most times their carefully curated years’ worth of fabric ends up in the trash due to the lack of knowledge of what to do with it. This is a sad state of affairs for a number of reasons. The quilter had hopes and dreams for that fabric. Now those dreams are gone and just clogging up a landfill. Don’t let this happen. If you become the caretaker of some other quilter’s stash, make a real effort to do something good with it. There are now such things as fabric thrift stores. Here in New England, we have Swanson Fabrics. From their website, “Swanson’s is a community fabric and fiber craft store stocked with the unused items of other sewers”. The shelves are stocked with donations, often times from individuals who have inherited boxes of goodies from loved ones.

A few weekends back, I went to a “yard sale” (pun intended!) of vintage fabrics left behind by a couture garment maker and drapery designer. I was delighted to acquire uncut yards of real bark cloth, which used to be in great supply in the 40’s through 60’s and was very popular for upholstery and curtains. I’ll be upholstering a mudroom bench seat with this beauty, a perfect addition to my midcentury modern home. You can also find antique shops that will be happy to rehome a fabric stash, especially if it contains vintage elements.

You can always find a new beginning for an old stash by donating it to a charitable sewing organization. These groups sew quilts for cancer patients, children’s hospitals, shelters for persons experiencing homelessness and other good causes. They are of course happy to take donations of good quality fabrics, especially quilting fabrics. You can find these organizations through local churches and quilt guilds.

Finally, I have had great success donating good quality, unused fabric to local public schools. After experiencing a downturn for a number of years, Home Economics classes are now coming back into fashion and they need fabric to help educate the next generation of sewing enthusiasts.

Are Quilters “Too Hard to Shop For”?

You are so hard to shop for

People who have very specific hobbies such as quilting are often told “you are too hard to shop for”, no doubt because our hobby is confusing to others who couldn’t tell a walking foot from a fat quarter. That doesn’t mean you can’t still give a thoughtful gift to a quilter. Surely, they don’t need any more fabric, and sewing machines are so expensive. What can we do for our quilting friend that would be appreciated? Instead of a tangible gift, how about an experience? An afternoon at a quilt museum would be great fun for your quilting friend and you might even learn something, too. The New England Quilt Museum in Lowell, MA was a delightful experience for me for the beauty and craftsmanship of the historic quilts and there were so many looms and machines of infinite complexity that my husband was captivated.

A road trip to a far-off quilting shop could be fun for the both of you, as the destination does not have to be the only purpose. A scenic ride and a nice lunch someplace could both be part of the journey. I can always find a model train shop along the way to any quilt shop so there can be a fun stop for my husband, too.

If road tripping for quilts isn’t your jam, how about something that would make your quilter’s hobby experience better? I do not know a single quilter who does not get excited about storage solutions. How about a trip to Ikea for shelving?  A friend in my quilting group was ecstatic on Christmas morning when her husband gifted her a 5×5 cubicle set-up for her workspace. She posted photos of it before she posted photos of the kids!

The next time you are stuck for gifting ideas for that special quilter in your life, be creative and think outside the block!

The Couple Who Hobbies Together

Payback for last year’s Tri-County Quilt Show

I was recently asked, “where do you get your inspiration for By the Yard”? The interviewer was rather disappointed when I replied, “ripped from the headlines of my life”. I don’t have some kind of clever writing process. Instead, almost all the By the Yard® comics are based on real life occurrences. This particular comic is pretty much word for word based on a real event. Train Guy and I had gone to a train show where the organizers were indeed boasting about how many acres of model trains were on display and that the event consisted of five gigantic expo-sized buildings. I dutifully trudged to and from all five buildings, enduring the New England January snow and ice. We had a nice time. We even saw the actual steam train from a village in Maine where my parents live. Train Guy visited every booth, some of them two or three times. He acquired some steam engines he had his eye on, literally dozens of train trucks (for the uninitiated those are the little wheely things that go under train cars) and a bunch of other widgets that served some unknown purpose.

After this auspicious day, a quick Google search revealed there was a quilt shop nearby. Being more than two hours from the house, of course we had to stop in. After all, when would be the next time we’d be out this way? As if we were in some kind of 80’s sitcom, the very second that we stepped into the quilt shop an exasperated patron burst through the doors and shouted out at the top of her voice, “And THIS is for the train show!!”. Train Guy and I gave each other a knowing glance and had to struggle to control our guffaws. He proceeded to putter around the shop while I checked out the goods at my leisure. He then tried to convince me to buy four yards of a fabric instead of the one yard that I thought was all I needed. That would be the inspiration for another comic for another day.

Since then, we discovered there are a lot of quilt-loving/train-loving couples, maybe some more so than others. My advice to couples who must endure their other half’s obsessive hobbies – whether they be trains, tractors, trucks, fishing rods or whatever – just be gracious. Sure, I can’t tell the difference between HO scale or ON30 and Train Guy still thinks a jelly roll is some kind of wonderful dessert, but by going to these events together, we learn more about each other’s’ interests and most important of all, we spend time together doing things that we love.

Top 5 Excuses for Projects I Won’t Finish

Quilters, sewists and crafters alike all suffer from an abundance of unfinished projects. We feel really guilty about it and struggle against it as if it were a rip tide, often to no avail. The causes of the stacks of uncut fabric and the bags of partially sewn treasures are many.  Here are the:

Top 5 Excuses for Projects I Won’t Finish

  1. It’s too difficult – As an accomplished seamstress who has been sewing long before prom dresses had poofy sleeves, you will never hear me use this excuse. For me, no project is too difficult, so I’ll have to move on to one of our other excuses.
  2. It went out of fashion – I know this excuse sounds hard to believe, but it happens more than you might think. Back in college, my sewing bestie and I decided to make sexy knit dresses that were basically a tube dress with a wide off the shoulder band. We trekked down to Boston’s Chinatown, where all the good fabrics stores used to be, and bought bright 80’s knitted prints for what we were calling our “She-Woman” dresses. Neither of us started sewing the dresses for several years. In our defense, we were both undergraduates at M.I.T. and thus were kinda busy. My friend eventually made her dress, but I never did. At least two decades passed, both the dress pattern and the print became hopelessly out of date, and I ended up giving the fabric away.
  3. I ran out of fabric – Running out of fabric is a very good excuse for not finishing a project. Sometimes, this excuse can be mitigated by searching online for just a little bit more of the fabric in question. Both eBay and ETSY are great places to start. You can even use Google reverse image search to find a matching swatch!
  4. I don’t have time – This is both a common and very sad reason for not finishing a project. After sewing for decades and always having a heinously demanding day job, my best advice to ameliorate this unfortunate condition is to make sewing a priority. Don’t wait for the dishes to be done and the laundry sorted before you will allow yourself sewing time! Sew first, do household chores later.
  5. Shiny! Shiny-object syndrome is quite assuredly the number one reason I continue to stockpile unfinished projects. Something pretty and distracting (i.e., “shiny”) will pop up on my Instagram feed and I simply must make it as soon as possible. I always tell myself, “I won’t start a new project until I finish something I’m currently working on”. Predictably, this never works. My best recommendation for combatting this syndrome is to get together with your other sewing friends and have a “finish it up” challenge whereby all participants agree to complete one UFO (un-finished object) by a specified date. You can then move on to the new project with slightly less guilt!