Every time I try to work on this Feathered Lone Star quilt with the bird embroidery, I am forcibly reminded of Candy Goff’s Misery Quilt. You must go read that story. Don’t worry, I’ll be here when you get back.

Now, my quilt started innocently enough, really, about three or four years ago. I wanted to make something different, but small-ish, to enter into the AQS show that year. Life got in the way, and the pieces are still sitting here waiting for me to put them together. I pulled it all out earlier this year to see what I could do with it, and maybe finish it up for the Houston show this year. I wanted to do something a little different with the setting, and the only fabric I had that I liked, I didn’t have enough of. (How this could be, when I have this much fabric in my house, is beyond me!) I carried all the parts with me to the States when I went to the Diane Gaudynski workshop in Paducah, and looked in every quilt shop we could find between Nashville and Paducah, but couldn’t find any more of what I really wanted, nor could I find something else to substitute that I really liked.

After I came home and I started thinking about selling my Pfaff embroidery machine so I could get the Bernina 440, I had a sudden inspiration about this quilt, and decided I wanted to put machine embroidery in the setting squares around the star, which meant that if I sold the Pfaff, I’d have to get the embroidery unit for the Bernina 440 right away if I wanted to do this quilt. I made that happen, and did test stitch outs of all the birds I wanted to use, purchased more thread, and things were just clipping along, except for the missing fabric, of course. I did finally settle on something else that’s a different color, but it gives the same effect so it’ll probably work out okay. I got all the birds done, and I put the whole kit and kaboodle up on the design wall to see if it was going to really work. I had cut the curvy pieces to fuse to the outside edges of the bird blocks, and thought I liked the way it looked. I fused all the pieces, then had second thoughts. And third thoughts. And then I didn’t like it at all. Read the rest of this entry »

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A couple of years ago, sometime before I damaged the tendon sheaths in my hand and wrist, I started a quilt with a Feathered Star in the middle, and I planned to border it with a Jinny Beyer border print. I was kind of hoping to enter the quilt into a show that year. I was going to appliqué the border with Jinny’s Soft Edge method, so it would look like this:

Well, after the hand problems started, I had to put it aside, and I just can’t see that I’ll be able to do that much hand appliqué again, ever. I can do delicate work like needle-turn appliqué for about ten minutes before my hand starts hurting, so it’s probably not going to get done that way. I pulled this project out of the UFO stash the other day to see what could be done to salvage it. I started trying to see if I could do the appliqué by machine with a really narrow satin stitch.

A couple of problems here; first, the satin stitching is way too bulky and just looks out of place to me, and second, when I was stitching it on the machine, it was difficult to keep everything flat and nice while the machine moved along. The border print fabric layer kept getting pushed out of place ahead of the foot. Definitely not satisfactory results.

Now, I’ve never been a fan of fusible anything. It’s just not my thing, especially for quilts that are…well…really nice quilts, like I would send to a show. Read the rest of this entry »

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