With a purple passion.
So, on the happy side of things, I finally got Cosmos done. This was one of my Cotton Cuts Puzzle Mystery Quilts—I think from maybe 2018? It’s an older one. I did the smaller size on this so it’s finished something like 48x60” or something along those lines. You have the option of adding borders but I didn’t choose to.
Learn from me: The difficulty with doing a BOTM over several years is you may not remember exactly what you did in terms of the 1/4” seam. Was I using a scant one when I started? A full one? Was I using this foot or the other foot? In other words, the end result didn’t come out exactly square. I’m not sweating it. It’s close enough for horseshoes and I’m not doing this for a show or anything. But I should remind myself to put a post-it in the project box with my exact foot and needle settings for consistency.
That being said, done is done. And done is good.
I then worked on the backings for both of the Puzzle Mystery Quilts (see Stratford here).
The backing on Cosmos went just fine. I still hated working with it. It’s something about wrestling with large swaths of fabric that gets to me. Even a pieced backing is irritating because eventually it still becomes a large swath of fabric—it just takes longer to get to that point. Which is equally irritating. When I get to the backing, I just want it over with as quickly as possible.
Then I got to the backing for Stratford, which is a larger quilt than Cosmos so it required a little different logic around how to cut and sew things back together to get them large enough in the right proportions. Somehow, I managed to cut it wrong. It would’ve been just barely big enough for the quilt itself, but not leave any to spare for attaching to the longarm machine correctly and to allow for the slack that the quilting process needs. I ended up having to sew the scraps from the original cuts together and sew them onto the end of the backing, so there’s a seam in an awkward place. It’s possible the seam may end up right along the outer edge of the border and might be able to get trimmed off in the end, but we’ll see. It was irritation on irritation, but again, “Done is Done and Done is Good.”
That was it for Day 5, except some reading and more binge-watching of History Channel’s Alone. (I’m hooked.)