Friday, January 7, 2011

Friday Morning

This morning, I was feeling sorry for perfectionists.  They miss out on so many opportunities for ingenuity.  This is one of my projects for today.  I'm filling in the missing bits from the Heron applique.  I had tried a machine, front basting approach for the first time.   To fix the parts I missed or machine basted very,very badly, I traced the sections on tissue paper including registration marks of the surrounding designs so it would be placed properly.  This time, I hand basted on the design lines.

I found that using a thick pin or needle to score the tissue paper, helped me to remove the paper while leaving the stitches in place.  The basting lines are the turning line.  This section is ready to stitch.  I still don't like this as well as back basting, but can see the benefit for working on dark fabric, or fixing omissions as I did here.


But you know me....just one distraction after another.  I won 3 yards of Day of the Dead fabric from The Quilting Professor.  It's even better than I imagined.   There's a yard of this and a yard of the same print with a cream background, plus a black background skulls with roses.  The reason I won it was that I promised to make a Hawaiian style shirt out of it for Harley Dude.

For reasons I can no longer remember, when we were newlyweds, I helped him to sew the shirt on the left.  I still have that pattern in the sewing stash.  Problem is, the shirt was made 20 years and 40+ pounds ago.  The shirt on the right is one that I know currently fits.  Good news:  the shoulder/yolk measurements are the same on both shirts.  Bad news: XL pattern calls for 2 5/8 yards and I have 1 yard of the coral and 1 yard of the cream.


I have made the adjustments and pre-washed the fabric.  Will keep you all posted.

1 comment:

Julie Fukuda said...

Have you ever seen people working on Molas. I wonder if they have a system like yours. It looks good so far. As for the shirt. It should be interesting in a combination of fabrics. Western style often combine fabrics so why not hawaiian style ... or maybe start a trend?