Shirt Pinwheels

I finished this quilt about two weeks ago. I started it a long time ago. It's mostly made out of old shirts, mine and Peter's, and a few odds and ends that matched the shirt fabrics. I designed the layout using handmade PostScript files that I would send to my late great laser printer. That was back in the early 1990s. It's big, about 80 x 96 inches. Something this big has to be hand-quilted. There were a few years when I put in a lot of time on it for a month or so. Then I would just fold it back up and let it sit in its unfinished place for a year or more at a time. But there really wasn't much left to do, and I had to write a paper, so of course I found time to finish it.

Originally I had cut two dark and two light squares for each pinwheel, and placed dark to light with right sides together. I drew a diagonal line on the back of the light fabric and sewed a seam on each side of the diagonal while feeding the squares continuously through the sewing machine. Then I cut along the diagonal so that I had two long chains of what we call half-square triangles. I pressed open the triangles of one chain and sewed them together to make half of 120 pinwheels. Then I started another project as usual. Eventually Cathy, who was two or three years old, found the second chain of triangles. She took one end and walked around the sewing room, under chairs and tables, winding the very long string of little pennants around everything including around itself a few times. It took me days to sort it out. Soon after that I finished the top and started quilting it. That was about 15 years ago. Meanwhile check out the rest of the blog and see some of what I did in the meantime.

Hand stitching a binding

Sewing down the binding is the last step in making a quilt, as far as I'm concerned. A label is an attachment to a finished quilt, and so is a hanging sleeve. When I've finished sewing the binding down, I have a finished product! This is why it's one of my favorite tasks in the whole process, even though it's relatively time-consuming.

Making the binding and attaching it to the quilt comes first. I found many, many instructions on the internet about how to do this, but not much about hand-sewing the binding. If you want to know how to make a binding and sew it on to the quilt, look for directions for attaching a continuous bias binding with mitered corners. You have to start with that to get the results that follow. In terms of other ways to sew down the binding, this link points to instructions that are very comprehensive. But I skip some steps. So I'm going to start sewing down a binding right now and take pictures as I go.

One difference between my way and other methods is that I usually don't sew down the little diagonal overlap at the corners. This might be a drawback if your quilt is being judged, but I have made many quilts, and the binding always stays put even when I run them through the washing machine.

I use a needle, thread, and scissors. I find it unnecessary to pin the binding down. If it helps, go ahead. I know people who do that, and it works for them. I don't press the binding flat before I start, either. I just wrap it around tightly as I go. I use a medium needle called a "sharp," thin but longer than a hand quilting needle, because the stitches don't really need to be that close together.

The Directions

(Instructions refer to the pictures below them.)

The binding is sewn down with a blind stitch. With the needle threaded and the thread knotted, start in the middle of one side. Pull the binding out flat with your left hand (that is, if you're right handed, otherwise these images are reversed). Poke the needle under the backing fabric a short distance away from the seam and come up just outside of the machine stitching.

Pull the thread just tight enough so that the knot is pulled under the backing fabric, but not so tight that it comes out the other end. Then fold the binding over tightly (use both hands to do this) and start by making a very small stitch on the edge of the binding.

Again tightly wrap the binding around, keeping the edge of the quilt flat. Take about a 3/8" stitch under the backing fabric. The needle should go into the fabric at the same place where the thread comes out of the binding, then straight up through the batting along the edge of the binding. Take another very small stitch just at the edge of the binding where the needle comes out and pull the whole thing tight. Repeat this step until you come to a corner or tie a knot. The goal is to hide the machine stitching, so the blind stitch should be on the side of the machine stitching towards the inside of the quilt.

Something that helps is to use the tip of the needle to pack the edge of the backing fabric tightly against the fold of the binding.

When you approach a corner, tuck the corner of the batting and backing as far into the binding as you can. The corner of the top, batting and backing fabric should not have to be folded at all.

Then fold over the rest of the binding for this edge and pull the binding for the next edge out flat.

Arrange to have the second-to-last stitch before the turn start right where the two machine stitched lines meet and come out just beyond the edge of the batting.

Now make one more stitch by poking the needle between the two layers of the binding, and with a small stitch, catch the point where the edge of the binding turns.

Make another small stitch in the same place, and before pulling it tight, thread the needle through the loop to make a little knot.

Turn the quilt and fold the binding of the new edge over. The first stitch will be a small stitch in place.

The next stitch should start in the same place. Proceed with the blind stitch.

By the way, that seam in the binding that you can see under the needle is a mistake. I should have figured out that a seam would end up right at the corner, and shifted the binding before I started sewing it on. But only a quilt judge would ever notice.

To tie a knot, make a small stitch in the same place where the thread comes out. Before pulling it tight, thread the needle through the loop. Repeat once more, then put the needle into the backing fabric in the same place, guide it through the batting and come out through the edge of the quilt. Carefully pull the thread tight and clip it close to the binding. The end should disappear back into the quilt.

Start again with a new piece of thread. The whole process takes a number of hours, depending on the size of the quilt. There are faster ways to do this, but this is how I do it, and at least one quilt judge has approved of my worksmanship. If these instructions are unclear or could be improved in any way, please leave a comment.

A Different Kind of Craft

For Cindy's birthday on Thursday, I made strawberry and raspberry parfaits. They were actually better than usual because I didn't scrimp on the raspberries. Then today I made a cake for when she had her friends over. I make this cake every year, but this was the first time I actually used cake flour, which is what the recipe says to use. It turned out just right. Both of these recipes are from Cook's Illustrated. They figure out the best way to make everything.

Winter Knitting

I don't know if this scarf is technically winter knitting - I don't remember when I started it or when I finished it. It was approximately last fall into winter, so I'll say it counts.

The sweater below was started and finished this winter. It's for Cindy's birthday, which is tomorrow. I have to say a few words about this sweater. It's knit in a beautiful Noro yarn that I saw at the yarn store in Rockport, Maine when we went on the last knitting cruise. I ordered five skeins online. Every skein had at least one knot, and the pattern was broken at the knots. So I carefully took apart all the skeins and wrote down the colors of each piece, and I was able to get the front and back to repeat the pattern continuously (though they did not match). Then with what was left, I arranged the sleeves to look approximately the same and more or less continuous. I only had a few feet of yarn left when the sweater was finished. It was tricky, but the result is just what I wanted. I sure hope my girl likes it.

Finally here is a red scarf. I thought winter would surely be over by the time I finished it, which was a couple of weeks ago. No such luck. A few words about this scarf, and the orange one above. They are knitted along the long edge on circular needles, always starting at the same side, leaving enough at each end for a six inch fringe. Fringes are knotted together every four rows. Every other stitch is slipped purlwise with yarn forward, alternating slipped stitches on alternate rows. It's called linen stitch, and it's very easy, though it looks bad if you accidentally slip the stitch with the yarn back. Also impossible to fix if you get out of sync with the slipped stitches. Then it has to be un-knitted. I used leftover sock yarn and very small needles for both scarves, casting on 450 stitches.

Finally, a Quilt

I started this quilt who knows when. The last project of my own that I was working on in the Coastal Quilt Artists group at Bobbie Sullivan's house was the Sunset Watercolor quilt (which I finished at the very end of the 2011 UFO challenge). That was about ten years ago. I had a lot of leftover blocks, and I arranged them into sixteen 16-patch blocks. At some point further on in time, I arranged the blocks as you see here and added the border using an artistic whole-cloth batik print. Then as usual the top sat around for a while. Eventually I partially quilted it and put the binding on it - last year sometime - and last weekend I finished the quilting and added a label. It is for Cathy, and I named it Sunset Colors 16-patch. (The original Sunset Watercolor quilt is meant for Cindy, but it still needs a sleeve to hang on the wall - after two years finished - sigh.)

A few more boxes

I had made this box to give to Arthur's mom, but unwisely tried to transport it folded into a box. I could have taken it apart and flattened the units. But I didn't, and two of the sides were torn, so I made her a different box when I got to Denmark. I found the torn bits a few days ago and replaced them. The top is pastel and the bottom is deep colors. Below the box is upside down.

I made a couple of boxes for my professors at the end of last year. This one was for the conservative one, so I used conservative colors.

This one has colors that remind me of Mexico. My final project for this professor's class was on credit alternatives in Mexico.

Origami Wrap Up

I started this origami quilt over five years ago. At the same time, I had made another one for the UUAC auction. Long time in the works, on my list to finish all that time. So much for the list. All I needed was a few days off, and nothing to supersede it in the pecking order of UFOs.

Here is the dual, a bit more cheerful with red joints instead of purple ones. But the red paper fades, and the purple is my own paper that I made at Origamido studio.

I had a few stars left over, joined with regular gray and gold origami paper. The stars themselves are cut from large sheets of paper that I buy wherever I can find it.