And this week was great in that I sat down at my machine and practiced. What wasn't great were my results. First off I wasn't sure what to practice on. I have TONS of scraps, but since I'm also working on three scrap quilts right now, I didn't want to use up all my large scraps on quilting practice. I found some white knit fabric shoved in the back of my closet and did my first attempt on that, but it was terrible because the knit fabric was stretchy and pulled too much while I was trying to guide my fabric. I guess the design came out all right for a first try, but you can see my stitch length is all over the place and the fabric went from being a square to being a....not-square.
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| It looks like my sewing machine had a seizure on the left side of the block... |
At the bottom of one of my scrap Rubbermaid tubs, I found some really cheap white solid cotton so I spray-basted that to some scrap flannel (just for bulk) and tried again. This time, guiding the fabric through my machine was MUCH easier, though my hands slipped a lot more than usual--I always thought quilting gloves sounded stupid, but now I see how they could be helpful. My stitch length is far more even, but the design....eh. The first couple of lines on the left are actually pretty nice, but then I got impatient or something and the rest are kind of pointy and jerky. It's less "Shadow Waves" and more "Shadow Someone-Threw-A-Freaking-Boulder-Into-The-Ocean-Waves."
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| I think the more embarrassing things here are the guacamole stains on the right. Please ignore my gluttony. |
I think the best part of this whole experience was the fact that I used crappy polyester thread wound on a crappy nicked spool. There is nothing better than being already frustrated with your sewing when suddenly the thread catches on the crappy broken spool and your entire spool of thread goes FLYING off your sewing machine WHILE YOU ARE STILL SEWING and sails across the room into the middle of a sleeping kitty pile, scaring the everliving crap out of everyone. Only MY crappy thread would be strong enough to catapult itself off my sewing machine instead of just breaking like normal crappy thread would.
Tune in next Free Motion Friday for the Drop Art pattern! I have a feeling this will be even worse...
Your lines look great to me for the first time, you shouldn't have mentioned the guacamole, haha, I would've thought it a " large pattern"
ReplyDeleteI think like this, if it was on a patterned fabric you wouldn't see the wobbles n jumps....well not so much!
Oh that image of flying thread made me laugh!! i had the same problem choosing which scraps to use too! x
ReplyDeleteLooks pretty good! :) That last paragraph made me laugh. I can just picture the chaos. Why do those sorts of things only seem to happen when we are already frustrated about something else?
ReplyDeleteI'd definitely say - so far, so good! But I bet the cat got a shock :)
ReplyDeleteNatalie this really made me laugh!! I'm not laughing a the fmq though, I think it looks really good :)
ReplyDeleteI'm not wasting fabric on practice either, just using old sheets!!
Mmmmmm guacamole! Scraps all the way babe. I think it looks good. At least yours is pretty uniform!!
ReplyDeleteYou really made me laugh with your description! I think you are just as good as most of us, and certainly better than I am!
ReplyDeleteok..i have to say, even though I've not met you, I love you more than a little bit for this post...and the guac stain.
ReplyDeleteThis made me giggle so hard! Maybe your machine is a snob so that is why it spot out the spool? I buy cheap solids for practice all the time.
ReplyDeleteI'm on a guacamole bender at the moment. It's soooooo tasty!
Oh my goodness this is funny!!!! We all struggled as we're all learning. Please don't get discouraged. I learned many similar bits - I can only push, but can't pull...small scraps are too small, etc. We can all only learn and improve from here, so we'll keep practicing together.
ReplyDeleteI nearly had a red wine with me at the time and thought that would be a hot mess with my FMQ-ing (if you can call it that). I get the guac.
You have made me laugh so much! Sometime learning curves can be mean but you've improved so much from the first to the second attempt, I bet your drop art will kick ass next week!
ReplyDelete<3 this
ReplyDeleteand i just laughed hyserically until tears came to my eyes because my
word verification thingy was "numicat"
ReplyDeletelike a yummy kitty. oh man, i'm outta my mind today!