The Valentine's Day Sewing Sisters Challenge

A couple of weeks ago at my Friday Sewing Night gathering at my aunt's house, Auntie brought out a bag of muslin squares embroidered with big red hears.  She wasn't sure where they came from, she thought maybe from her sister had given them to her.


The squares were sewn in rows of five or ten blocks.  After discussing what we could do it was decided to cut them apart and share them between my aunt and us cousins.  Each one of us would get four and make a table runner or topper, depending upon what kind of table we have.


My aunt had some red yardage as did one of my cousins.  Another cousin was designated to cut the strips from the yardage while the rest of us un-sewed the rows.  Some of the seam rippers were better than others... so there was a discussion about un-sewing.  Our recommendation:  buy a GOOD seam ripper!! 


I calculated how much of each border fabric the squares would require, and we were all sent home with a kit.


I missed the next week's sewing night but I did work on my runner.  For holiday stuff, if you procrastinate, sometimes you've missed the holiday and it's hard to re-motivate.


My table is a big rectangle, and I like a long narrow runner down the center.  But when I calculated the amount of border fabric I was figuring on a square, so I was about 25 inches short.


I got the first border on and realized what I had done, so I only sewed the borders on three of the four sides.  Last Friday I went back and showed my incomplete project.  Lucky me, there was a big piece of the inner border left, and all I needed was one two inch strip.  My aunt had her block of four sewn together and was ready to layer it and finish.  One cousin had dropped part of her kit in the drive the previous week and had to be reunited with it, and the other two hadn't started yet.

Saturday brought snow and wind back to us, the perfect weather to stay in and sew.  Plus I had picked up a new sewing machine on Friday and I wanted to give it a test run.  The sewing machine post is for another day.  Let me just say, it was a total score!!

My aunt had suggested that we do a fancy embroidery stitch around the heart.  She had done that and it was really cute.  It was a rather plain block before that, and the hearts were kind of rustic-looking.  I agreed, so I added some fancy stitches through the quilt sandwich to serve double duty - embellishment and quilting all at once.

I did some free motion quilting in the borders but decided that my quilting is not good enough for the sections of solid fabric.  Combine a new machine with my inability to warm up to FMQ and all that negative space made me shudder to think of the mess I could have made.  So I quit while I was ahead.


While doing the fancy stitches around the hearts was fun, it was a little stressful too.  For example, doing this design taught me two things:  designs can be directional so this one might have been improved by going around so the scallop framed the heart; and drag matters.  See how the design elongated at the point of the heart?  I should have been making sure it was all supported, because it changed size and messed up the spacing.

Sorry for the fuzziness... but see how
the design got stretched?  There was
drag on the quilt that pulled it through
the needle too fast.

I'm sure that if I had been doing that design with a regular presser foot, that would not have happened, but I had the walking foot on the machine, so there was opportunity for the quilt sandwich to slide through too quickly and stretch the design.  Oh well, I was not taking it out.  No. Way.

I bound it with some bias binding that has been in my stash for a long time, and now sits on my kitchen table just waiting for the big day!

Regarding the FMQ, I think if I do another piece, I'll experiment with marking the quilting and see whether I enjoy that.

If not, I have a checkbook!

Sew on...