shaking my head

A local quilt shop is having a class for coiled fabric baskets- you know, you wrap fabric over a cotton rope and sew it in a coil, pretty and simple- and charging $25.00 for the class!!!  Ok, maybe those ladies go because it's recreational and social and they don't really care about what the class is.  Maybe none of them are drinkers, they'd never go to the bar for drinks (in my book a much better exchange for money).  But good grief!!!

A lot of things about crafting and especially quilting pisses me off.  I called out someone on their facebook page once about their quilt kit.  The quilt was being sold by the month with the fabric etc already in there, pre cut and color coded.  The person just had to get it out of the bag and put a 1/4 inch seam in it and they'd end up with exactly the same quilt as on the picture, a kind of paint by the numbers quilt.  If that isn't bad enough, the COST of the quilt was about 4x what you'd spend if you paid full retail for quality fabric etc.  I am just horrified by the whole deal, the lack of individual input, the price gouging.  The kit maker assured me lots of people liked the kits.  Sigh.

I know I'm cheap, but how can there be so many people happy to over spend on "crafty" CRAP, and so many willing to sell it to them?

Quilting

 
Somewhere around two years ago, I started a quilt from an even-then old sew along hosted by Leila of sewn by Leila.  I got maybe 9 blocks in and paused for a long while. When I returned, most of the tutorials had been removed and are now in available in a book by the blog author.  This one, cactus flower, was still up until I completed it a couple weeks ago, it has since gone.

I relearned about watching out for blended fabrics in my stash.  I'm fairly sure my prints are all 100% cotton, but I still have some too- pretty sea foam green and the solid white in this block.  I should have thrown it out but I'm pretty sure it got neatly folded and placed back on the shelf. The different fabric contents are what caused the wrinkling in the block above.  It went together fine, but a little steam shows pretty quickly the difference in shrinkage of the two fabrics I was considering redoing, but the pattern/tut was gone when I went back.  I like this too much to eliminate it, so it stays.

The cactus flower made me feel good enough to whip this one out the next day.  It looks a tad bit smaller than the 12 1/2 inches that it should be.  Might have to have a skinny little border before the border.

This one could be titled "Pinterest fail".  I saved the pieces, but even after giving up and sleeping and coming back later I could not get it together.  It is likely there were some errors in the directions- I searched up some other patterns for this size of "card trick" block that had some different measurements.  There was plenty of room for my own error as well.  I had to flip some of my HST's over backwards.  No matter what, I couldn't get the pattern together.  Very frustrating.

I then went to paper piecing.  I figured there is no other method that would give me the accuracy I was craving.  It was kind of painful for me to "waste" all the fabric this method requires me do.

Trying to trim it down prior to piecing resulted in immediate poor results.  I had to unpick this last diamond and recut and sew.  THAT'S waste!

Worth the effort though.

Completed beauty:  Star of Mystery by fresh lemons quilts.  This one got me jazzed enough to google my local quilt shop, see that I could get 20% off if I sewed two NICU gowns/smocks for premmie babies, sew said two smocks and trot down there today.  Very happy with my purchases.

Don't know how long this particular spurt will last, maybe I'll have a complete quilt to QUILT this fall!!! Piecing is not my most favorite part of the process.  All that sticking to the rules you know.  I'm getting ready to try my hand at some improv and see how that goes.