Wow, it has been much too long since my last post! We've been super busy here with work, regular life in general, and vacation. We just got back from a weekend trip to Tennessee where we went to the Bonnaroo music festival. We had a fantastic time, but it means that I haven't had any time to really sew since Memorial Day weekend.
I know my goal was to get all of my characters finished, but of course I was sidetracked. We spent some time on the UW-Madison campus that weekend just enjoying life. And, I've gotta say, it was really nice to just relax and not be focused on a deadline. So - my sewing took a break.
But - I'm back at it now! I was able to get 4 characters about 1/2 way done over Memorial Day weekend. I had the squares sewn together into strips - which is the most time consuming part. So, last night I spent time getting all of the strips all nice and pretty so they're easier to sew together into the block.
Want to know what makes this step soooooo tedious? Ironing! It takes probably about 30 minutes if I'm really focused to iron all of the strips together and then I still have to clip off the thread strings. In order to sew them all together nicely and have the corners match up, I have to iron the seams in opposite directions for each strip.
While I'm ironing, I take the little bit of extra time to lay out the whole block in ironed out strip so I can double check that everything is sewn together correctly. I have had a couple of strips that have had one too many squares just from things getting stuck together. All-in-all I haven't had too many mistakes like that so my seam ripper has stayed tucked into the drawer on my sewing machine! Yay! :) Laying out the strips also gets me to check that the character is facing the right way. If it's not, then I just flip all of the strips over and voila! - it's a mirror image of itself.
The next step is to get all of these strips sewn into the completed blocks. Once these 4 are done then I only have 3 left to do! Hopefully this weekend I'll make some more progress, but with Father's Day and my father-in-law's birthday I probably won't get everything done... We'll see! Happy crafting!
I know my goal was to get all of my characters finished, but of course I was sidetracked. We spent some time on the UW-Madison campus that weekend just enjoying life. And, I've gotta say, it was really nice to just relax and not be focused on a deadline. So - my sewing took a break.But - I'm back at it now! I was able to get 4 characters about 1/2 way done over Memorial Day weekend. I had the squares sewn together into strips - which is the most time consuming part. So, last night I spent time getting all of the strips all nice and pretty so they're easier to sew together into the block.
Want to know what makes this step soooooo tedious? Ironing! It takes probably about 30 minutes if I'm really focused to iron all of the strips together and then I still have to clip off the thread strings. In order to sew them all together nicely and have the corners match up, I have to iron the seams in opposite directions for each strip.
While I'm ironing, I take the little bit of extra time to lay out the whole block in ironed out strip so I can double check that everything is sewn together correctly. I have had a couple of strips that have had one too many squares just from things getting stuck together. All-in-all I haven't had too many mistakes like that so my seam ripper has stayed tucked into the drawer on my sewing machine! Yay! :) Laying out the strips also gets me to check that the character is facing the right way. If it's not, then I just flip all of the strips over and voila! - it's a mirror image of itself.
The next step is to get all of these strips sewn into the completed blocks. Once these 4 are done then I only have 3 left to do! Hopefully this weekend I'll make some more progress, but with Father's Day and my father-in-law's birthday I probably won't get everything done... We'll see! Happy crafting!
this is going awesome I'm going to keep seeing if I see it
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