Wailing and Gnashing of Teeth

I really thought that I was going to get a whole lot of quilting in this weekend.  Apparently though, it was fortuitous that I recently read “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” by Michael Chabon, so I could be reminded of the Yiddish proverb, “Mentsch tracht, Gott lacht.”

In English:  man plans, God laughs.

Since the office was closed Friday, and my husband was at a miniature wargaming convention all weekend, I thought I was going to have two solid days of quilting Friday and Saturday.  I had plans Sunday with Rhonda and Wendy for a mini stitch-in, so the grandiose part of my brain that churns out the unrealistic expectations had me visualizing completing the quilting on Convergence Birds in time to be hand-sewing the binding by Sunday afternoon.

But when my mom found out I was going to be a gaming widow all weekend, she invited me to their house on Friday.  We had a delightful visit (and homemade vegetable pizza with pretzel dough crust!) and both my brother and my youngest sister were there, which was a very pleasant surprise.  However, between the late start I got in the morning, bad traffic, and then my reluctance to cut such a pleasant family gathering short, I got home at about 10:00 pm.  No quilting Friday.

Saturday, I had a short list of household chores and food prep to accomplish before I could mentally release myself to quilt.  I had also planned to run a couple of errands and go to the gym.  However, we had a (second) full day of soaking rain with terrible wind gusts that made me really not want to leave the house.  So rather than either gritting my teeth and going out in unpleasant conditions, or making a command decision to scrap the errand-running altogether, I dithered.  I made my various plans contingent on one another, and ended up as just a big entropic mess.  So while I did eventually clean and cut vegetables, prep the pulled pork barbecue, bake banana muffins, clean the bathroom, and put away the snowman decorations, it was very late in the day by the time I did.

I got some quilting in, while listening to the director’s commentary on “The Lost Boys” (RIP Corey Haim!)  While I was originally just going to quilt the center Convergence area in an all-over design, as Ricky Tims recommends in the book, I realized upon looking at it on the design wall that my seams were more straight-ish than straight. Whether this happened as a result of carelessness when appliqueing the bird border or if there had always been issues, I’m not sure.

It may not be obvious in miniature, but those seams were waving like a flag!

So I took a page from longarm quilters and did some ruler-guided ditch quilting.  I used the blind hem foot, which has a modest rudder coming out of the middle (less dramatic than the one on the edge-joining foot), set the needle to stitch right next to the rudder, and guided the foot with a 3″ x 12″ Omnigrip ruler, adjusting the quilt top to keep the seams straight.  It’s not perfect, but it’s much better than it was.  I used MonoPoly by Superior Threads so the ditch quilting wouldn’t contribute to the visual design.

I sang with choir Sunday morning and then had a lovely lunch and visit with Rhonda and Wendy, during which I sewed twisted cord onto two more cross-stitched nativity figures (3 down, 6 to go.)  We really need to make it a priority to do stuff like that more often; I always feel so motivated and renewed afterward.  After they left, I gamely trooped back up to the studio.  While there were only a scant few hours of weekend remaining, I was confident that I could complete the quilting of the bird border.  After all, at this point, I was feeling rather accomplished.  I had chosen a fern-feather no-mark overall design and had experimented to find the best color of Bottom Line to use as my quilting thread:

The fuchsia in the upper left didn't show up, but the light green was visible without being obnoxious.

I had quilted for about twenty minutes, completing three big ferny feathers with echo quilting and little spirals, when my thread broke.  Odd, I quilt with Bottom Line all the time and never have problems with it.  Hmmm.  I turned the quilt over to the back and found…

AAAAGH!! Giant knots of thread!!!

One advantage to using a different color in the bobbin than in the top is that it’s easier to see where the problems are.  In this case, the giant thread knots are made of light green top thread, rather than fuchsia bobbin thread, but the tension looks pretty good otherwise.  So I have to do some experimentation to find out if it’s a) the tension; b) the needle; c) a bad spool of thread (hey, it could happen); or d) an unknown unknown. But I have done nothing so far, except to spend TWO AND A HALF HOURS ripping out the bad quilting.  I got it all ripped out Sunday night, went to bed, and I haven’t been back in the studio since.

I hope to have a chance to rectify that tomorrow.  However, if I can’t seem to face Bird Convergence, if it seems too much of an impasse, I can always pull out Lemoyne Stars.  I talked to Diane last night, and she gave me a great idea on how to sew the pieced border on before cutting the Bad Border, so I don’t have to worry about getting the measurements or the math wrong.  After all, why work on a problematic project when there’s another, less frustrating one waiting in the wings?  And I wonder how I ended up with so many UFOs…

And now, in tribute, one of the best scenes from “Lost Boys.”   Michael and David didn’t sparkle one bit.

Meet the UFOs! Part I: Lemoyne Star

I can’t put all my UFOs up at once, or this would be the longest post in blog history, but I have to start somewhere, and I may as well start with one that I never dreamed would end up unfinished.  As with so many dysfunctional relationships, it all started so well…

Complementary Color Lemoyne Star

My friend Diane and I took a class from Barbara Lenox in 2003 (or so) on Lemoyne stars.  I definitely needed a class, because my first attempt at sewing together 45-degree diamonds resulted in bra cups rather than blocks.  Now, Barbara has a reputation for being a tough teacher because she insists that you do things her way.  But her way works, and what did you come to class for if you just wanted to do things the same old nonworking way?

As part of this, she had us make our class blocks using red and green diamonds.  She didn’t want to have to talk about light and dark, or fabric A and fabric B, she wanted to be able to say, “Put the red diamond on top of the green diamond” and have everyone on the same page.  It was very effective, but at the end of class I had red and green stars on a pink background, as I hadn’t wanted to make Christmas blocks.  They were beautiful and flat — not even a training bra.

At this point in my quilt life, I believed myself to be a finisher.  I was not comfortable with the idea of putting these blocks in a drawer for some mythical future project; I wanted to make a quilt.  A big, bed-size quilt.  And I had just bought my mom a book about two-block secondary designs.  So I made a total of 12 Lemoyne star blocks, using complementary colors from the color wheel as the star points with pastels of the three primary colors as the backgrounds.  (No one was going to accuse me of not thinking this through.)  Then I used one of the block layouts from my mom’s book to make the alternate blocks and join them together.

Then I was possessed by demons.  At least, that’s the only logical conclusion to be reached if you look closely at the border fabric I used on this quilt top.  I wanted a black background, and I wanted all the bright colors from the top to appear in it to tie it all together.  However, I apparently didn’t want to spend any time or effort finding the RIGHT fabric to meet these criteria, so I bought the first one I found:

"We wish to welcome you to Munchkin Land!"

I won’t sport with your intelligence discussing WHY this is a bad border fabric (for anyone who doesn’t happen to be a 6-year-old playing Pretty Pretty Princess, that is) but I will say that I have no intention of ripping it all out.  Since it is actually pieced into the alternate blocks, ripping it out and replacing it would be an exercise in futility and a way to make sure that this UFO stayed unfinished forever.  But I do plan to cut the Bad Border down to a less objectionable width and add a pieced border, which I actually made the blocks for within the last 4 years, the last time I tried to finish this quilt.

I don't exactly remember what I was trying to accomplish here.

So what’s the holdup?  First off, there’s fear of failure.  I have to calculate the right size to cut the Bad Border down to so the pieced border fits properly, and then I have to actually cut it down correctly and accurately.  Both these obstacles seem much harder than doing it right the first time would have been, and undoubtedly seem harder than they will be once I muster up to do it.

This quilt also represents another barrier to finishing, the learning curve.  In a (wonderful, game-changing) machine quilting class I took in 2004 from Karen Kay Buckley, she told us that people frequently ask her how long it took to make her latest (gorgeous, award-winning) quilt.  She said she always wants to answer, “My entire life up until now.”  This makes perfect sense to me.  Every quilt I make is a learning experience, and I’d like to think that each one gets a little better in some way or another.  When I have to “go back in time” to finish a UFO, all the things that I would now do differently jump out at me, and they get demoralizing.  In some ways, it seems easier to just move on to a new project that doesn’t have these problems than to try to fix this one.

Some good advice to remind myself of at this point:

“Nothing in life is a failure if you learn anything from it — even if all you learn is, I’m never going to do that again!”  — Ricky Tims, speaking at the Ricky Tims Super Seminar, Richmond, VA, July 2007

“There are many tragedies in life — a mistake made in fabric is not one of them.” — Libby Lehman, speaking at the Ricky Tims Super Seminar, Frederick, MD, May 2009

“Just play.  If it goes wrong, fix it.  The best things happen from that.  If you haven’t done anything wrong, you haven’t done anything right, either.” — Sieglinde Schoen Smith, speaking at York Quilters’ Guild, July 2009

Amen to all that.