Cats and quilts

Has this ever happened to you?



Shortly after I laid out these blocks and took the picture on Monday morning, my cats came tearing through the family room and wrecked the layout.  What is it about cats and fabric?  Any fabric I have out anywhere in the house is like a cat magnet.

Fortunately, I use a simple system for sewing blocks together and it was very easy to straighten this out.  These blocks were already sewn into rows so I only had to get the rows back in the correct order. 
Once I have a layout I like I put a safety pin in the upper left hand corner of the first block in the first row (upper left hand block).



In the second row I place the head of a pin in the 2 o’clock position like this:



Then continue down the rows placing pins like the face of the clock.  Here are rows 3 and 4:



It was easy to put the rows in the correct order and now the top is sewn together!



This method also works when sewing blocks into rows.  These are blocks from a shop sample that I’m piecing.  I laid them out at the shop on Monday then brought them home to sew together.  I didn’t want to turn the blocks before I had them sewn so I pinned them to keep them straight.

Row 1: pinned with a safety pin in the upper left hand corner.  Pick up all the blocks in the row in order and safety pin them together.  When you are ready to sew the rows together re-pin the safety pin in the upper left hand corner of the first block.  Make sure to keep the pin here until your entire top is sewn together.  That way you always know which way is up!



Row 2 (and subsequent rows):  Pick up the blocks in order from left to right (the first block on the left will be on top).  Place a pin with the head in the 2 o’clock position.  When you start sewing the blocks together, place the pin back in the left block so you don’t flip the row.  Keep the pin in place until you have row 2 sewn to row 1.


Continue with all the rows:



I know you can buy pins that have rows and columns marked, but you have to keep track of those pins and store them in order or search through them to find the correct one.  That’s more trouble than it’s worth for me and this method works great with any pins.  If you have to keep columns in order, use the same method, but place the pins in the center of the top of the block (instead of the left hand corner).

Hope this easy tip helps you stay organized when sewing your blocks into tops!

Fixing the disaster

When I realized there were two blocks turned in my friend’s quilt as I was sewing on the binding my heart sank.  It was such a hard decision whether to just leave it or try to fix it.  I ended up fixing it.  It wasn’t hard, but was time consuming because I wanted the repair to be as inconspicuous as possible.  Here’s how I did it.
I started by carefully removing the quilting stitches from the two blocks and about 1 inch into the surrounding blocks.  Then I “unsewed” the blocks, turned them the right way and sewed them back together.  Because I didn’t want to remove any more quilting than absolutely necessary, I had to hand stitch a 1/2 inch area that I couldn’t turn.  You can see the stitches in the close-up but they are really almost invisible.



Remove the quilting stitches to the seam (this will make it easier to bury the knot), leaving tails long enough to knot.  Usually I would do this from the back of the quilt, not the front but the back was a solid gray fabric and I knew it would be easier to hide the repair in the print fabric on the front.



After the tails were tied in a knot I used a self-threading needle to bury the threads.  I love these needles for this purpose because they can be threaded with short tails.  You just slip the thread through a slot in the top of the needle.  If you can’t find them locally they are available from Amazon (who knew?) here.



Insert the tip of the needle a stitch length away from the stitching line and bring it up an inch or so away. 



Pull the thread through.



Then clip off the threads.



Re-quilt the area.  When you start, leave the tails on so you can tie them off and bury them like you did when you removed the stitching.



Repeat this process for every start and stop you have to do in the repair.  I had four.  In the end though, you couldn’t even tell on the solid backing fabric.



Like I said, it wasn’t really hard to do, it just took a lot of time.  My friend picked up the quilt on Monday and she was very happy with it.  It did turn out well, especially since she is a beginning quilter.  It is queen size and since my quilt stand broke I had to fold it over this drying rack to photograph it.  This is about 1/4 of the quilt.  You can see that from this though that the turned blocks would have really stood out.  And I really wonder why we didn’t catch it earlier???