Epic Quilting Fail

My brain is such that I like to just start working on a project. It doesn’t really matter if I know anything about HOW to work on said project, I’ll get it in my head to just start. Git’in and git’er done. I’ll have the line of Point A to Point X lined up in my head and I’ll figure out the details as I go.

This works for me. I will fail, I will have epic mistakes, I will learn hands-on, and I will obsess and THEN go back and read destructions instructions. I will read, research and devour everything on the subject until I get frustrated that I can’t find something I haven’t already read/done/know.

This makes for a fantastic blooper pile that I get to giggle over. I’m happy to say the blooper-to-success ratio is moving more in my favor as I go along, but my “git’er done” mentality still makes for some hilarious F-ups.

Take my first quilt, for example. I love it. It’s on our bed. It’s ginormous. And it was all done completely wrong.

I had this vision of a simple patchwork, country-bumpkin, 30’s influence red and green blanket of comfy.

Quilt Dream
Quilt Dream

I got a bunch of fabric from my mom’s huge 30-year stash and filled in a bit here and there. I borrowed my mom’s Kenmore, also over 30 years old, and started sewing. On the basting stitch setting.

Stitch Length Fail
Stitch Length Fail

As you can see, it’s already unraveling. My mom, a master quilter, looked at it, told me what I did, then told me about “nesting seams” (note title of linked page: Quilting Basics) all the while never snickering at this mess like I am now.

I love my mom.

Then, I sewed them all together in long strips, because then logically I could then sew the strips together, of course!

Quilt Fail
Quilt Fail

Yeah. And that is how you get colossally miss-matched seams. (At this point, I’m using a Janome 6260QC and luckily it did a LOT of the thinking for me….no more weird thread tension or stitch length issues due to user-fail.)

Quilt Piecing Gone Wrong
Quilt Piecing Gone Wrong

This made picking corners to tie-quilt….interesting. By the end, I had already read everything I had done wrong up until this point, picked random (aka creative math) corners to tie, rounded the corners to more easily bind it (LOVE Dove Trims 50 yard rolls of bias tape), threw it on the bed, and called it good.

Fail Quilt Binding
Fail Quilt Binding

I can confidently say now….I’m happy that I went the route I went. I couldn’t have learned more (or had it sink in better) any other way.

 

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