The back speaks

Happy Blogoversary to meeee. I wouldn’t have noticed if Teena hadn’t mentioned it in the comments! It was yesterday, June 16. I’ve been writing this blog for four years!

And now back to your regularly scheduled post…

There are a lot of people, I have discovered, that don’t like to talk much about the back of their embroidery/cross-stitch. I was alerted to this by an avid cross-stitcher a couple of months or so ago, who says that some people get quite shirty about the perceived “perfection” of the backsides of their projects. Indeed they do! I’ve since confirmed how weird people are about this, and I have to say that I am mostly perplexed by this competitive perfectionism.

So here’s the back of the Iris Quilt.

I have two things to say about the back of my quilt. First is the useful thing – I was unsure whether quilting was going to benefit this piece. I just kind of went for it because I like quilting, but honestly, I was prepared to rip it all out. I didn’t rip anything because I liked how it turned out. The Iris Quilt has turned out to be the most densely quilted small piece I’ve done. It just felt right. The ironic thing is that unless you can see the texture of the piece it doesn’t really look quilted from the front. It’s mostly invisible or unobtrusive. The texture is really the important thing.

The second thing is …. I don’t believe in perfection. I think it’s overrated and unattainable. I like taking apart watches to see how they work, because I like to see the inside guts of things. Therefore, it’s important to me that when you flip one of my pieces over, you see this part. The not-so-pretty stitching. The part that makes the front side work. The “inner guts,” as it were. And if people would like to fault me for that or critique my sewing, I don’t really much care. I think I’ve gotten to that point in my life where I respond to criticism with a mildly amused snort and then do what I feel is right for me.

I also wanted to show off the beautiful texture on the front, so there are two pictures of that. The quilting on this has made it more lovely than I thought it could be, even with the exquisite fabrics I used. My mom remarked when she saw it for the first time that the flowers seemed puffy – they are not at all flat to the surface. I designed the quilting to play that up, and I think in the final analysis that really works. The quilting is done now, I’m now proceeding to work on the very last step – the binding! I’m super excited to get this completed and sent to my mom.

Iris quilt 3: putting it all together

Okay, so when I left it last time I had all the leaves and sky background sewn together, and the flowers were pieced. It’s time to start putting the whole thing together at last.

Holes in my piecing

One of the most difficult parts of this quilt was getting all of the individually pieced sections put together. There were 5-6 sections that I pieced first, and getting them together and aligning all the seams and flowers was more of an art than a science, definitely.

After I got it all pinned out on the foam, I placed the flowers temporarily to make sure everything was going to work out. It was a bit weird to see the quilt with holes in it where pieces looked like they ought to be.  I discovered during this audit that I needed to add in extra pieces here and there, and I had to rip some more seams since I was having problems with some leaves not lining up between the sections. Plus I discovered two problems where my original pattern had sort of gone awry because I’d colored it wrong and therefore used the wrong fabric – big d’oh! Still, it went together almost like I wanted it to.

I spent two nights fixing problems that appeared so that everything lined up and my flowers would fit. You can see this does-it-fit process below.

But eventually all the problems were fixed, the leaf and sky pieces were all pieced, and the flowers were pieced together. It was time to finish up the pieces prior to getting on with the embroidery.  In order to finish putting it together I had to stabilize the pieces.

Stabilizing & Applique

This quilt when it’s done will be four layers: quilt top, linen, felt, linen. The first thing I did when the piecing was done was to baste the quilt top to a piece of linen with my favorite quilt basting spray (it’s re-positionable and not permanent). This stabilized the top layer so I could applique the flowers, and made it all nice and flat and less slippery.

For the flowers, I turned all the raw edges under to create a narrow seam and hand-basted them (you can see it below – right alongside one of the 400 episodes of The Closer I watched while doing this project!). Then I pressed the seams down so they’d stay put. Then I stuck some small pieces of Steam-A-Seam under the middle of each flower and placed the flowers appropriately on the top of the quilt, covering each hole in the piecing. Then I ironed each of the flowers, thereby permanently fusing the flowers to the linen underneath the quilt top.

After getting it all in place, I appliqued all the flowers on by hand using iiittty biiittty tiny stitches around the edges. Luckily, about the time I finished that my mother was actually around, so I could show it to her!! She thought that they were irises immediately, which was extremely gratifying.

The last stage (which I am currently working on) is using my typical quilting/embroidering process to give the thing proper quilting texture and fuse the four layers properly. I’ve started and nearly done with the leaves and stems, and lastly will quilt/embroider the flowers. Finally after that comes the border! I suppose I have another week or so of work to finish it up.

Whew. I’ll photo up the project when it’s done and post more about it. Hopefully with some decent lighting! Let me know what you think of it so far if you’ve managed to read all the way through all this nattering on!

Iris quilt 2: fabric piecing technique

So in Part 1 I talked about making the pattern, the next step is cutting and sewing the fabric. If the sketching and template took about a week, this took about 2, then another week for the flowers and applique. Finally, it will take about 2 weeks to finish the quilting/embroidery. That’s working a couple hours each night and then putting in about 8 hours over the weekends.

Steam-A-Seam to the Rescue

As you can imagine, cutting tiny irregular pieces was a bit of a trick. It took me a few attempts before I figured out a good technique to get the pattern pieces reliably affixed to the fabric so I could cut it out with seam allowances.  The pattern pieces are so small that you can’t use pins or it just totally distorts the shapes. Plus silk is slippery, so it’s not like friction was going to help me.

Steam-a-Seam to the rescue! This product is essentially re-positionable sheets of tape. It’s sticky on both sides (but not really sticky or sticky enough to damage fabric) and if you apply a hot iron, it will bond permanently to your fabric. But I was only interested in the re-positionable aspect, not the heat-bonding aspect. What I figured out to do was to:

• Place the paper pattern piece onto the sticky paper;
• Cut out the pattern from the sticky paper, adding 1/4″ seam allowances all the way around as you go (see picture below);
• Place the new pattern+seam allowances template on the fabric (using the other sticky side) and cut around it.

BAM! The sticky paper stuff temporarily sticks the pattern pieces to the fabric. This allows the slithery fabric to stable while being cut, and also holds the pattern piece in place while the fabric is being cut. Also, since the sticky paper is translucent, after the fabric is cut out I can see what the piece looks like with and without seam allowances. Below is a line of [cut-out fabric + translucent sticky + pattern pieces] on top. You can see the seam allowances, and you can see that I marked the order in which I needed to sew the pieces together right on the pattern from right to left.

When sewing, I just removed the sticky and paper pattern pieces and pinned the two pieces of fabric together as the pattern pieces indicated. I would stick the two pattern pieces together on the wall next to me (another benefit of sticky paper) so I could see how the seam allowances interacted before I sewed. Since the sticky part was transparent, it made it much easier to see how the seam allowances + pattern interacted and I was able to (mostly) sew everything quite precisely the first time around.

Sewing the Seams

After I finished a section, I’d color it in on my “progress meter” sketch. Below is the bottom right section after I completed it, and to the left is the sketch showing that section completed. I was super pleased it was actually looking like it was supposed to. The seams were small, the pieces were small, and because of that it was impossible to really know before I started what it would turn out like.

I had a lot of trouble sometimes getting everything in its proper place. I was really careful with seam allowances, but I had to rip out seams sometimes. You can only be so careful, I suppose. I sewed the whole thing in five or six sections first, (one section shown above), and then eventually pieced the sections together. Determining the order in which to sew was tricky, but very important given the irregular shapes.

Below is another example of some piecing I did, this time on a flower. Despite my sticky-paper method, I actually had to rip out that seam twice and redo it because I wasn’t satisfied with the placement of the pieces. Talk about your picky details! It was a really hard seam to sew. It would just NOT LIE FLAT.

Next up: what does the thing actually look like?  I’ve shown you a lot of in-progress, so next up I guess it’s time to show how it came together.