Monday, March 17, 2014

Post card ...almost

For my birthday (yesterday I turned 60!) I went into the sewing room and played. I've been reading Kathleen Loomis's blog and one of the things she has done is an alphabet series of quilts. I got the idea to play around with her idea for a post card. The inspirations is this; her blue j quilt. But I immediately came across a problem, selvages look great on hers and I have some but they would be too big for a postcard. I could cut strips of fabric, but that would mean cleaning off the cutting table, pulling fabric, cutting, etc.... So I challenged myself to only use what was on my floor, or what I'd just picked up off my floor and put in the trash. /since I've been cutting shirts up for my stash I had a lot of bits of seams and stuff on the floor.
First I made a B. Using confetti onto a piece of wonder under...not very effective. Then I started putting bits of shirting scraps on an interfacing blank, cut just a wee bit bigger than 4x6. And I had this:
I did not like the B. So I threw it away and came up with plan b.
Here I'd started sewing it with 1/8" lines. Here the stitching is complete but the postcard is not.
Then it was time to get ready to go to church. (The last photo you can enlarge to see more details). I like it. The binding could be pale or one of the B fabrics. What do you think? Now I want to do another, with the letter bigger, but for my first it is okay.
What I would do different;
  • lay down a faintly stripped fabric over the interfacing to help keep the strips straight and to make it so the interfacing doesn't show behind/between strips of fabric.
  • Have lines for the B too. (I drew lines on the interfacing but had no lines under the press sheet while I constructed the B.
  • Enlarge the letter, maybe more whimsical.  
  • Try to use tiny drops of glue instead of the tiny drops of iron on stuff.
So do I do another, better B or go onto another letter.
It was fun. 


1 comment:

Kathleen Loomis said...

Happy Birthday, Laurie!

I'm so happy that you have adopted my idea and are having fun with it.

I have used striped fabric as the backing for some of my selvage quilts (or sometimes I have drawn some straight guidelines onto the backing with a ruler) but other times I have just embraced the fact that the lines aren't perfectly straight. Either way looks great, I think.

I usually just draw the letter onto the backing and when I get to that line, I cut off the strip in the background color and lay in a new strip of the figure color. But I'm working a lot bigger than you are, so that method probably wouldn't be helpful for you. I do like the fact that the edges of the strips kind of wave in the breeze rather than being glued or fused down flat.

But as with the straight or not-straight strips, I think anything you do with little bits of fabric looks great.