Feel My Pain, Hear My Cry

Some days the stars are aligned against us, or so the ancient greek and roman philosophers would have had us believe. Then again some days are just a ******.

A couple of days ago, whilst sewing my borders for my bubbles quilt, I thought my machine was a little sluggish. Turned out there was enough fluff in the bobbin bit to make a hamster a woolly jumper. So far so good. Every time I tried to replace the race, the machine wasn't havin' it. The needle stuck, the wheel thing on the right stuck, and there was a horrible noise. I took this out and put it in so many times, even googled it on you tube, and looked at the manual. I took the executive decision to walk away and two days later discovered I had threaded my machine wrong! Techy I am not.

There was a window of an hour or two, and I thought great. I will get these borders sewn up. They sewed together very nicely, and then came the mitre bit in the corners. Now, you have to remember, I am pretty much self taught. I put the first corner together at 45degrees and sewed it on to the first two sides.

 And then I did the same with the second. This was sewing the mitre corner off site, so to speak, then attaching it to the quilt.

Next came joining the third corner. The red corner. The "feature corner". You know where this is headed. Miraculously the mitre looked really good, the black matched the black and the white matched the white and it all lay nicely flat. Feeling rather good about myself, I trimmed off the excess fabric and opened the quilt out.

You can probably guess what happened. My beautiful mitre had made a box corner in my quilt. A perfect box corner, but ..... look closely and you can see the join. Look in that vague direction and you can see the join.

I tried to explain how I had made this convex instead of converse, or converse instead of convex or whatever it is. He didn't understand. It doesn't matter anyhow, it is wrong. I tried sewing the cut off bit back on. In the Feature Corner. If I did a lot of quilting, would anybody notice? Yes, they would. It sort of defeats the purpose of the feature corner, to hide it down the side of the bed next to the radiator.

Luckily I had bought 4 metres especially for this eventuality! I am busy over the weekend, but come Monday, the stitch ripper will be out. This time I will also make the red corner the off site mitre, just to be sure, to be sure. Quilting is a very humbling hobby, none of us are perfect, and it pays to remember this.  So my mother used to tell me, unlike today's youngsters who seem to grow up believing they are perfect as is everything they do!

One last sneak in - a new project. Always good to start a new project at the busy time of year! Yvonne is having another quilt a long again. I loved hers last year, it was the snowflake quilt. This year Yvonne, quiltingjetgirl.com , is making Wayward Transparency, a version of her transparency series. I love the calm. quietness of these quilts, their tranquillity. In keeping of this tranquil calmness, I am doing mine in hot pink. Hot pink is for the summer. I love sitting in the garden in the summer. So far, we have made our half square triangles in our three graduated shades.

 I am up to date! I think I will leave my trimming until another day, and quit when I am ahead!

Helen x