Friday 3 August 2012

Folks and friends and banana curves

Voile. I. Love. you.

Really there isn't much more to say to this. I made my deep blue sea quilt last year from my ever growing stash of voile and and loved it to bits. And every time I open my voile/tana lawn box and feel the fabric I simply don't want to sew with anything else anymore. The softness of the voile is out of this world and tops most silks in my humble opinion. But of course that isn't realistic so I just allow myself every now and then a trip into voile land which is a bit like a guilty pleasure.



So I dived head first into the joyous land of voile and stitched together another strip quilt (sorry if you are getting bored of them). This time I wanted to mix it up by including some Liberty tana tawn print and solid but that went disastrously wrong.

When sewing a strip quilt top you need to hold on to the strips while sewing quite tightly, meaning when you are sewing together two strips you should hold the strips between your fingers to ensure they are fed evenly thought the machine while at the same time pulling slightly to the left so you are not creating a banana shaped curve. I am normally fairly aware of this having done two strip quilt before but with this one nothing worked. I had the worst banana shaped top you can imagine and my seam ripper had a whale of a time......

I wasn't quite sure what happened so started all over again but this time checked every couple of strips and found I only had the problem when I paired voile with tana lawn and no matter how well I held on to the strips while sewing the end result was still a curve rather than a straight line.

So in the end I binned all the tana lawn strips and stuck to just voile which worked a treat.


The prints used in this quilt top are a mixture of 'Little Folks', 'Innocent Crush', 'Loulouthi' and 'Prince Charming' which is why I am calling it 'Folks and Friends'

With all the Olympic watching going on there is little time to sew over the weekend but hopefully a few hours quilting will fit in somewhere. I fear my eyes are taking on a TV sized square shape soon.

What a great day team GB had yesterday and finally my home country Germany is picking up some medals too.


4 comments:

  1. Just having a post-Brit Rowing medal-fest blog surf!
    Love this quilt so far, minus bananas xxx

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  2. Another trick when sewing long strips together is to start sewing half way down the strips to one end, and then restart in the middle and sew up to the other end. Not sure if it would make any difference to the Lawn in this instance, but worth keeping in mind. Your fabric combo is fab! Jxo

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  3. I am loving this fabric combination and the name you have given to the quilt. Can't wait to see it finished. I agree with Judith, above, start sewing in the middle and see if that helps.

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  4. Just found your lovely blog!! I've sewn lots of quilts with jelly roll strips and have taught classes on "strip quilts". My advice is to sew the strips together in pairs. Then when you sew the pairs together, you sew them in the opposite direction - this will stop the "banana" or "rainbow" effect - it works every time!! Oh and press the pairs of strips as you go rather than pressing all of them when your quilt top is finished - good luck!!

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Thank you for your comments! I love reading them and will answer every question you have on my projects. But I have a very busy daytime job and am therefore not able to thank each and every comment. Please don't be offended if I won't reply.