I’m finding that sewing can teach you a lot about life if you just pay attention. Today’s lesson is that it generally doesn’t pay to do too many things at once:

Bobbin winding thread wrapped around main thread

This is what happens when you try to save yourself time by leaving the bobbin spool on so it will be there when you need to wind bobbin thread again. It does not save you time. It seizes up the machine and takes quite a while to undo. Lesson learned.

I also managed to get some sewing done this week. Most quilts have a border around the edge that brings out one of the patterns from the squares and often it is continued on the backing of the quilt. Generally it’s a continuous strip of 1-2 inches wide, depending on the pattern of the quilt. Not easy to do with prints. I did want to make my quilts look like traditional quilts and I felt they needed borders.

One thing I learned pretty quickly about this process is that there is no consistency in this. The pattern I’m working on now, School Girl’s Puzzle, required 20 large dark triangle prints, 60 small dark triangle prints, 40 square book pages, and 100 triangle book pages. There is just no way those are all going to be cut the same size. When they are sewn together the size differences just get compounded – and it makes the piecing together of the pieces and then the squares an interesting puzzle itself.

So what I’ve come up with for the borders is to have pieced borders that I measure and cut per block once the blocks are sewn together. I cut 2” wide strips of the border print that I’m going to use (that are longer than the blocks) and then place them against the block and mark the edge of the block and cut it right there.

Measuring Border Strips for “School Girls Puzzle (for Halice)”

I keep a small self-healing cutting board, rotary cutter and cutting square right next to the sewing machine just for this purpose now.  I’ve found the process works quite well and I’m liking the unifying design element across the quilts.