5BarGate2

Just about the ONLY thing I have done this week is work on “5BarGate2”. The quilting and painting was already done and only one of the half circles had been fancified. It takes a really, really long time to add machine embroidery stitches, couching and rickrack to a quilt… I was not quite happy with the consistency of the satin stitch in the central smallest circles so I decided to hand-sew some beads to hide the sewing underneath. 

When I had finished sewing I was disappointed by how wavy the quilt’s edges were. This was the result of the half circles being heavily stitched whereas the diagonals were not. I pinned it all to the carpet and steamed like mad before and after trimming. The long edges were still ruffled so I decided to attempt an undetectable bit of gathering in the less densely quilted areas. There was an improvement but it was still not completely flat! 

For a change I hand sewed the binding onto the back because I wanted a narrow binding on the front as my rings were so close to the edge that I lost some of the outer ones when I trimmed the quilt. To disguise this, I added a thin, gold crochet cord into the ditch of the binding of the front and THEN went round the binding again with a slow-moving triple stitch. I began to wonder if I would ever finish and trim all of the loose threads. After skooshing yet more steam along the edges, it looks like it should hang flat :)

After attaching a label and a sleeve, I decided that the quilt would also need a denim tube-bag to travel in while it is on tour as part of the Bernina collection. I just need some bright sunlight to take better pictures so I can finish editing it as a book project.

A couple more customer quilts arrived this week but almost all of them want custom-quilting to be completed before Christmas. This is to be done as well as trying to make the two leather evening bags for the book, being courageous enough to work out the next step on the prom dress and taking out the satin Aladdin pants for Fenella’s dance show.

I had a few techie moments working out how to get my Mac and the old projector to communicate. I do not understand any of the instructions that I downloaded from a Mac forum but everything seems to work perfectly. I wasted more time trying to draw quilting ideas onto quilt diagrams using various apps and had limited success with my lack of graphics expertise. I might just do something low-tech instead and photocopy some design ideas onto acetate then try to figure out how to include that in an E-book!