Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Sewing Circles

Yet another update on my jeans circle quilt:

I'm now about one-sixth of the way through sewing the main zigzag stitching that holds the tie-dye fabric and the batting and the circles all together.


I'm finding that it's pretty much impossible for me to sew the arcs smoothly as I try to muscle all the fabric through my little sewing machine. I'm using a zigzag stitch length that is spaced a little apart (that is, not a satin stitch). Partly, I prefer the look, and partly I want to speed up the sewing just a bit over the nearly-infinite time it would take for nearly zero-length stitches! But that carefully-chosen stitch length is meaningless. The feed dogs (those toothy things underneath the needle) are nearly useless for pulling the heavy quilt through and I can't keep an even feeding tension myself with the big pieces rolled up in my lap or spread out on the kitchen table.


I mentioned the sheer magnitude of the pinning for this quilt in a previous post, but now that I'm actually doing it, I'm finding that it's even worse: as I'm forcing the quilt around and through the sewing machine, I keep impaling myself on them! I have prick marks all the way up to my elbows. "Suffering for beauty", indeed!

But here is how it looks so far.

Here is how the back looks:


For those of you who might be curious, here is what I chose to do for the batting. I have two different types of polyester batting, with one layer of each. Why make more work for myself? By the time I had decided I didn't like the single layer of the first one, I had already bought a whole quilt's worth of it, so I figured I may as well use it and just add more. Compared to everything else, the difference in work required was pretty small, fortunately.


Well, back to work!

1 comment:

Sara said...

Making progress.... I've now finished sewing almost one third of the quilt! It's currently in three pieces, where the center piece is one row wider than the outer two pieces. There is light at the end of the tunnel...