Learning Experience

Making this quilt was different from others I had started. I really wanted to finish this one. I'd had trouble with pieces not fitting before, so I'd done my homework about how to do better piecing. I was absolutely anal about my seams being the same size. I trimmed every single piece, every new sewn unit--absolutely positively everything was trimmed. It was tedious and time consuming but the sewing went unbelievably fast, and there was less trimming to do as the units got bigger.

In retrospect, I probably went overboard. But it did make the sewing go smoothly and the quilt dimensions come out right. It also taught me about fudging seams when pieces just aren't the right size.

New blogger mistake, not moving the sewing machine cords. >.<

But good gravy. It was hours, and hours, and hours of trimming and pressing. It was mid-summer, very hot, and while I was quilting in my air-conditioned bedroom and therefore very happy to be there, it is around this level of monotony that my brain turns to goo. The repetitive quality gets to a point where I do stupid things like cut my leg with a rotary cutter because the only space large enough for the mat is on the floor (I have a table now, it is a vast improvement) and I just stopped paying attention to exactly where my leg is in relation to the circular razor in my hand. I was lucky the cut was shallow, but sweat and blood is not a metaphor for this quilt.

At some point, in a gasp of self preservation, I started watching Heroes (then off the air). This was a Really Good Plan.

This led to a renewed appreciation of the awesome that is George Takei and a brief but
profound crush on Zachary Quinto's eyebrows.

I have no idea the actual number of hours I spend working on this quilt, but I watched all four seasons of Heroes and then moved on to five of the original Star Trek films before finally caving and watching the first season of Original Trek, which I somehow managed to make it to adulthood without seeing. (This is a failure of geekdom I cannot rationalize or explain. I don't know what happened. I even missed the unbelievable nerditude of my family's referral to adults as "grups". I don't know how I missed this.) Assuming I was always watching something I think it comes out to something like 150 hours, but between the initial cutting and having fun with scraps making the backing it was definitely more.

I think it came out well though:

I'm really, really pleased with it. So pleased I've been a bit terrified to quilt it, as my quilting skills are not quite up to snuff. So it sits in the UFO pile for now. Eventually I'll get good enough at the quilting or am not poor as dirt have enough extra cash to get it done professionally. Hopefully I'll have finished the backing by then. ;-)

Things I learned:

-Making the points of triangles line up is a pain to do freehand. Pins are your friends. This tutorial from Connecting Threads (not affiliated, just quality!) has some excellent pointers for making points line up.

-Making something look random is harder to do than you might expect. I did at least four floor layouts for this quilt before I got something I liked, including one with my mom helping out. This is definitely something to do in the planning stage rather than the assembly stage!

-Sewing with polyester thread is no fun. At all. I had no clue when I started, and by the time I knew better it was too late to turn back. Cotton thread all the way.