Journal Notes

Trying to come up with creative ways to use up all these double knit squares for the CWC group at church. This will use up 180 of those squares. I backed them with a cheap interfacing and cut them out with my new tumbler template. Decided to make this one an underwater scene with fish, inspired by a quilt I saw on Pinterest. I tried mixing up the blues and reds randomly in the scene but it didn’t work. There was not enough contrast to make out the fish very well. I used a glue stick to iron down all of the seam allowances. I pressed them open to reduce bulk. This was very time consuming, especially on the long seams connecting the rows. They were very stubborn and did not want to lay down. It was worth it when I went to quilt it though. Had no problem getting over the intersections. Had to do a diagonal seam on the backing because it wasn’t quite wide enough. This was fun to quilt. I looked up pictures of sea creatures on my phone and then did a rough sketch of them with a chalk pencil on the quilt and followed it with the machine. For the crab, I used the laser that came with my machine for the first time. I used it to follow a continuous line drawing on my phone. Was pleasantly surprised at how well it worked! I was also very surprised at how fast I was able to go on the waves without the machine messing up. I must have had everything just right this time. What I learned: 1. Mark a dot for each corner using the template before you cut out the tumbler shapes. I tried eyeballing where to line up the pieces for sewing but wasn’t happy with my accuracy. 2. Trim all the dog ears off BEFORE glueing the seams down.