The word for today is overload. I am overloaded, so
overloaded. Here’s what’s on my plate: finish my art quilt, then prepare and
submit a digital image for the exhibition catalogue by June 24th.
Prepare for the Writers’ League of Texas Agents and Editors conference in
Austin, June 26-28, including preparing for two in-person consultations to
pitch my book. (Wish me luck!) Keep up with and attend our weekly German
lessons in preparation for the trip to Austria in October, and keep up with all
my other obligatory appointments and committee meetings. Attend at least one
more performance for which I already have tickets (and really don’t want to
miss).
I thought I had this in hand, but best-laid plans and all
that. And it doesn’t help that problems keep arising. Take the art quilt as an
example. I’m making it for a collaboration show for one of my favorite
organizations—Women
in the Visual and Literary Arts. I decided to participate in the collaboration at
the beginning of April when my friend Sandi started looking for a partner.
Sandi is a phenomenal poet, and I jumped at the chance to work with her. We discussed
our ideas and had lunch on April 9 to solidify our plans. That’s when my
conception of the quilt came into focus.
It took days to research best methods for accomplishing
what I wanted to do. I watched video after video on portrait quilting, found
the perfect image to work with, and started drawing. I ended up at FedEx having
a huge blow-up made of my 8.5 x 11 drawing. About that time, my quilt guild featured
a speaker who presented her portrait quilts and offered a one-day class. I jumped
on that with both feet and took the class on May 6th. By the end of
the class, I had a decent start on the primary figure in my quilt and I knew
what to do with the rest of the portrait.
Because it was a different technique than the one I had
been researching and preparing for, I had to scratch my original work and start
over. Did I mention that I did this between the end of the presentation on a Tuesday
evening at 9 pm and the start of class the next morning at 9:30 am? Long night…
After I finished my main figure, I needed to make a
background. That required contemplation, planning, and execution, none of which
were simple or straightforward. But I managed and by the end of last week, I
had the quilt of my dreams. I couldn’t have been happier—until I contemplated the actual quilting. I am
usually a hand quilter. It’s time consuming, but I’m good at it and it’s what I
am most familiar with. Occasionally, I quilt on a machine, but I don’t enjoy it
much.
Domestic sewing machines—the kind people sew on in their homes—have a short throat. The
throat is the open area that fabric feeds through. Picture a larger item, like
a quilt, rolled up on one side and fed through this small throat while the rest
of the quilt is hanging over your shoulder. Trust me when I say I find it
difficult to manage. Now add monofilament thread, which is basically fishing
line. It’s invisible, making it tricky just to thread, let alone sew with,
because normal machine settings don’t work with it, and lots can go wrong. But monofilament
is beautifully invisible on the surface of an art quilt when you do it right.
The goal is to machine quilt my fiber art with monofilament
thread on my domestic machine while maintaining my sanity. I started the actual
quilting Saturday, giving me eleven days to finish everything. By Sunday
afternoon, I had sewn four diagonal rows of quilting, each about 60” long. By
Sunday night, I had removed all 240” of stitching from the quilt. I needed to
start over because things had gone terribly wrong. It’s Monday afternoon now. I
spent the morning researching machine quilting with monofilament thread. As a
result, I discovered all the errors I made in setting up my machine, including
wrong needle, wrong tension, wrong stitch length, and wrong thread set-up. Sigh.
Earlier today, I ordered the top recommended thread to be
delivered overnight by Amazon and I have re-prepped my quilt sandwich already.
(A quilt sandwich consists of the backing, the batting, and the quilt top. The
quilt top is the pretty part that you see, everything else is structural.) I
have adjusted all the adjustable parts per the specifications I gleaned from
YouTube videos and Copilot. When the thread arrives, I will stitch some test pieces
and hope it all works as planned. Say a prayer for my success. I will have
eight remaining days to do the quilting, then square it up and face the edges
so that it is a proper finished quilt.
Now about everything else on my plate: arrghh!!!
What’s driving you crazy this week?
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My mother always says, "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." I agree.