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The Worst Day Quilting

The worst day quilting is still better than the best day working, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a pretty bad day quilting! We asked our readers “What was your worst day quilting ever?” and got some pretty “bad” responses. Here are some of the worst:

Sewing in a block upside down and not noticing it until after it was quilted.
Miscalculating the yardage needed and running out of an irreplaceable vintage fabric.
Spilling a glass of red wine on a baby quilt top the night before the shower.
Finding out your husband used your good quilting scissors to cut wire… as evident by all the mysterious notches in your cuts.
Sewing an applique block to your pant leg.
Deciding to pre-wash your fabrics and finding out that one of them wasn’t color fast.
Discovering the hard way that the cat got accidentally shut in the closet and then relieved himself on an unfinished, folded quilt top.
Investing untold hours into a Dresden Plate baby quilt with scalloped edges for a family member only to be told by the recipient “This is lovely, but I already got a quilt for the baby… at Target”.

Your well-meaning husband mistook a bag of quilt tops waiting for the long armer for a clothing bag destined for the donation bin.

And, finally, the winner of the Worst day Quilting was hands down (no pun intended): Cutting the tip of your finger off with a rotary cutter. Don’t worry, this fearless quilter went straight to the ER and her steadfast dedication to quilting was unharmed.

Use Your Phone… for Quilting?

Phones are used for everything these days. From making dinner reservations to finding an auto shop or counting calories, there is nothing that phones can’t help you with… including quilting? Yes, even quilting, and not just for taking perfect pin-worthy glamor shots. Phones can help you plan your quilt in a number of useful ways:

Auditioning Fabrics – Looking for the perfect color combo? Assemble a dozen different color combinations and take a picture of each. The combos will be easier to flip through on your phone and you won’t have to re-arrange fabric piles one hundred times.
Layout – Can’t decide between “this way” and “that way”? Take a picture of each layout to compare side by side. You can try printing the options out on paper so they are bigger and easier to see. You can even tack them all up on a wall for thoughtful rumination.
Arranging Fabrics by Value – Arranging fabric by value (such as the light-to-dark needed for the perennial favorite Log Cabin quilt) can be difficult, especially when lots of colors are involved. You can achieve this task easily by taking a picture of your fabrics lined up, side by side, then using your phone’s photo edit features to “Save As” a black and white photo. In black and white mode, the colors can now be easily arranged from darkest to lightest.
Quilting Calculators – From Binding to Backing, there’s a Quilting Calculator out there to compute every quilting metric. Never get caught speechless at the cutting table again!

Start Early and Still Be Late

Have you ever walked into a big box store in the fall to find Halloween decorations displayed right along with the Christmas fare? While many people would roll their eyes in disgust, I would not. For me, skeletons next to the stockings is a bellwether that holiday quilt making is nigh! You can’t start too early, in my opinion. I say that from experience as I have a treasure trove of unfinished holiday projects. Every year I say I’m going to start early but every year I end up with a craft fair’s worth of unfinished projects.

I’m still working on a Christmas table topper that I started four years ago. It’s just a table topper… thank goodness it isn’t a memory quilt! Worse than that, I have a bag of kitschy satin thread-covered Styrofoam ball Christmas ornaments that you decorate with ribbon and about a million beads held on with pins. I bought that kit way back in the 80’s because I thought it would be a fun project to do with the kids. The kids grew up and moved out years ago. The ornaments remain not started and ever hopeful that their time will come. Maybe this year.

I bought some Alexander Henry holiday prints that I planned to make placemats out of three houses ago, back when I used to have an epic dining room table. I’ve packed that fabric up and moved it three times since then. I can’t bring myself to get rid of it because I know it’s going to make beautiful placements someday, whatever table it eventually ends up on.

The top for a log cabin quilt made with beautiful, muted holiday colors is finished but it’s still waiting for batting, backing, quilting, and binding. This was the second or third quilt I ever made, back when all I knew how to make was Log Cabin blocks. My quilting expertise has improved considerably since then, and I could make any quilt block now. Maybe its rudimentary design is keeping me from finishing this one, but I do have an amazing sleigh-ride print for the backing fabric which keeps this quilt full of promise.

Whatever holiday projects you haven’t finished, do not despair. There is always next year!

Boost Your Productivity… by Quilting?

I wasn’t born rich and all the stock options I’ve been promised by employers over the years have never paid off so I, like most people, must work for a living. It’s too bad that working really cuts into my quilting time. I have stacks of unfinished projects and I’m really starting to feel guilty about all the projects I planned that I haven’t even started yet. It feels like I am putting in more and more time at work, and any “extra” time I might find that I have gets spent on catching up with work. I rarely spend time on creative activities because there is always so much “work” to do. What is a quilting girl to do?

The solution may be simpler than you think: just quilt. Don’t put in the extra time at work, quilt instead… because it’s GOOD for you! As a matter of fact, deliberately carving out time to enjoy your leisure activities will – believe it or not – help you at work. A study conducted in 2014 at San Francisco State University found that people who often engaged in a creative activity scored 15-30 percent higher on performance rankings. Apparently, engaging the creative side of your brain helps bolster your problem-solving skills. There you have it, proof at last that quilting is good for your job performance.

So, tonight instead of hunkering down over some more spreadsheets, I’m going to get back to finishing my Christmas quilt. My boss with thank me!

Two Whole Days of Quilting

Wouldn’t it be great to have two whole days of uninterrupted quilting? As a person with a full-time job, a house and kids to look after, it seems like little more than a dream. Or is it? Here are some ways you could have two whole days of quilting to yourself:

Quilt Cruise – I though it was crazy when I first heard of it but apparently, Quilt Cruises are a thing. They are just like regular cruises – only with quilting! You bring your sewing machine with you, and you spend your time aboard with likeminded fiber enthusiasts. Similar to traditional cruises, you make stops at various ports – hopefully visiting quilt shops.
Laid Off? Quilt On! – I don’t recommend getting laid off on purpose, but if you did, you should definitely spend at least half of your time quilting. After all, you can only send out so many resumes per day.
Work in the Biz – Lucky are the few that have found a way to work and quilt by working in the quilting industry! Pattern designers, fabric designers, quilt shop employees, long arm quilters, quilting fiction writers and more appear to have the best of both worlds…. getting paid to quilt!
Retreat – Tell your work you have to go visit sick Aunt Sally, tell your family you have to go on a work trip but really go on a quilting retreat. Double win!
Hijacked Zoom Calls – I was recently at an online event for people in the fibers arts and there was a participant who was measuring time to completion on a quilting project by the number of Zoom calls it was going to take to finish her quilt. Now that’s multi-tasking: Expert Level.

It’s Not As Easy As It Looks

I don’t remember how old I was, but I know I was old enough to drive so let’s say around 16. I was at our house in Maine puttering around doing something when the phone rang. This is back in the old days when the phone hung on the wall. No one ever called so the opportunity to pick up the phone was an exciting event not to be missed. It was my grandmother, she needed me to come over right away. Now you have to understand, my grandmother talked very fast and always had LOTS to say. I couldn’t really understand what she was saying… something about her eyes? Grammy had notoriously poor eyesight and it seemed she was always recovering from one eye operation or another, so with my parents not being home, I rushed right over. We didn’t have 911 in our town back then so I figured, whatever the emergency, Grammy was small, I could hoist her into the car and be off to the local hospital in jiff.

When I got there, I found out the situation was much different than what I had imagined. Grammy’s eyes were fine, or should I say, the same as usual. The real emergency was much more dire – she could not thread her sewing machine. She tired and tried, but due to her “darn eyes” she just couldn’t see well enough to do it. For a minute, I stood there sort of in disbelief, thinking: “You called me over here in an emergency… to thread your sewing machine?”. Luckily, smart-mouthed 16-year-old-me for once knew better than to say anything. I simply threaded the machine and asked, “Is there anything else I can do?”. Delighted that her machine was back in order, Grammy chirped “No! I’m all set!”.

I paused for a minute. “What if you need to change colors? Should I hang around?”

“No”, she said. “I’ll just stick with white. It’s not like I can see it anyway!”. Fair enough.

For years and years, I used to tell the story of how my grandmother once called me to her house under the auspices of an emergency to thread her sewing machine. For some reason I thought this was hilarious… until I was about 40. These days, it’s considerably less funny. My eyesight is so bad now that I have to use a special pair of glasses to thread the machine, a different pair for running it and a third pair still for cutting fabric. Every time I thread my machine now, I always think of Grammy. I feel bad for making light of her predicament but at the same time, I feel close to her. She loved sewing and continued to do it when she could literally not see a thing. I can only hope that I’m around as long as she was to keep on appreciating all the joy that sewing brings.

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