Friday, July 27, 2018

Dealing with a fabric bleed

Yay!!  My quilt was finished!  It was finished before the baby had arrived with a few weeks to spare.  And then...I took it out of the washing machine.

There was a fabric bleed.  This was from a bee block so I don't know where the fabric originated from, but let's be honest...I don't prewash my reds either so such a thing was bound to happen eventually.  I looked on the internet and found these two sources: from SuzyQuilts and Quilts of Love.  They both follow similar methods.

I filled up the tub, added some boiling water, and put a color catcher on the quilt.  I put the quilt in the tub, making sure the whole thing was under the water level, and waited.

When I checked it after...maybe four hours...the bleed was gone!  Yay!  However, there was a new color on the quilt. 

Do you see it by the third safety pin?  I think it was the pin that did it, but I'm not 100% sure.  (I would like to note that having the color catcher on top of the offending fabric was a good idea as it did bleed more.)  Anyway, after beating myself up a little bit for not being able to see the future, I tried putting it back in the washing machine with stain stick.  No luck.  I tried white vinegar + salt + sun.  No luck.  I finally decided to just add another piece of fabric on top of it and call it good, since this isn't a show quilt.
When I took the pin out, there was a small hole in the red part.  The applique blends in very well...I appliqued it on and then copied the quilting to secure the piece and to hide it better.  As for the hole in the red...I'm not going to do anything.  Since it is on the red part it doesn't stand out too much, and I'll take safety pins out of things prior to washing if they aren't needed.  Lesson learned.

quilt notes

I'm working on this quilt very intermittently, and am having trouble remembering what I'm supposed to be doing...

9" squares: turn into HSTs with white triangles.
8" squares": increase to 9" squares
misc: cut 5x to 10.5" squares and the rest to 9" squares

I need 19 little arrows, 5 big arrows, 1 big arrow head, and 5 arrow heads.

I have made, or have parts for...4.5 big arrows (2 made) and 10 little arrows (10 made)

The layout will match that of the picture below, but the fifth column will have the big arrow at the top and the last column will have the big arrow like the fourth column.


Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Quilting

I recently finished quilting a quilt that my mother-in-law is going to give to a new family member.


In the white areas I did a back and forth in white thread.  For the colored areas I used 'Chevron Peel' from 180 Doodle Quilting Designs complied by Karen Burns.  I used green thread on the outside squares, red thread on the middle squares, and blue thread on the innermost squares.


Chevron Peel is a new motif for me and it went pretty well.  I should have planned out the diagonal direction for the corners better though.  The ones shown here are nice, but there are a few corners that have the same diagonal twice in a row.

Thursday, July 12, 2018

Pulleys

I tried to do pulleys, a pattern I saw in a book, on a border, but...mine ended up looking rather phallic.  Needless to say, I unpicked all the quilting. 


(Note: it looks fine in the book example.  I probably needed to make my pulleys narrower...but I'm also not sure I'll be trying this one again.)