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!
