We Use Quality Ingredients to Make Our Product

A few years ago, one of the big companies in the US used this as their tagline, and I never really thought about the word "quality" until this weekend.

We started quilting for a customer and nothing was going right, the stitches were ugly on the back.  It seemed like the tension was too tight, and we had thread break after thread break.

At one point, there were 5 people clustered around Tim Gunn trying to make him work.  Finally we had to crank down the tension wheel and unwind a part of the thread from our tension wheel.

The problem, we determined was that the customer had used cheaper fabric and then provided REALLY thin batting.  There was literally nothing for the thread to hold onto in the sandwich as the needle passed through during the quilting process.

The entire fiasco was compounded by the fact that the backing fabric was made with a silkscreen process and the white back of the fabric was showing with each needle pass.

So it goes back to the phrase, quality ingredients.  What makes a great quilt ... quality fabric.  I'm discovering that for the best results, use cotton fabric and make sure that your batting has a great loft.

Who knew?

Pick a Little, Talk a Little ... Pick Pick Pick

Border: <bo-dur>

A geographical border, a defunct bookstore OR a guide for a Statler-Gammill machine to define WHERE it is supposed to sew.

This was our weekend to go visit our pretty long-arm machine.  It's a 2 hour drive to the shop and we left our houses at 6:30 this morning.

Well, we must have been still snoozing from the long drive because when it was time to put the borders in our computer ... we simply forgot.  Our machine (or Tim Gunn as we like to call him) took that to mean, "hey, sew where-ever you feel like."  Big oopie.

We spent about an hour picking out the stitches of our edge-to-edge pattern from the border area (and the first 20 minutes of THAT time was using a pair of scissors and a pin since we couldn't find a second seam ripper)  Ugh.  What a colossal waste of time (or as our teacher Kelly says "an opportunity for learning!)

Good news.  We got the stitches out (thanks to Loree since I was far slower and more easily distracted from this chore) and we finished Michelle's quilt.  Next up: Mary's!