Another Day, No Blood This Time

Well, that last round of soldering hurt.  I managed to stab myself good with a twisted and sharp point of the copper tape I tried pulling off of the glass, thinking I might be able to re-use it.  No such luck.  The front was cracked in half, the adhesive clearly melted solidly onto the glass.  What a mess.

I decided to give it another whirl and it turned out much better.  Clearly, I need to continue to practice, but at least it's not so bad.  I think I can wear it if I continue to move so that it's a bit of a blur and the wobbly line of rhinestones won't be so obviously wobbly.

It could use another go 'round...

Why does the back look better than the front?  More flux, that's why!

When I feel in a bind in terms of just NOT knowing what I'm doing, I find myself wandering the internet for help.  I actually did find a couple of YouTube videos that offered good advice.  One person noted that if you find yourself getting a lot of lumps and spikes in the solder, use more flux to get it flowing.  Great advice!  That's one thing I did much more with this version.  The other video offered suggestions about adhering the paper artwork to the glass first which I don't think I'll do.  I worry about how that glue will affect the paper.  In the soldering class that I took, the instructor had us use a modicum of glue adhering paper to glass.  I found that the heat of soldering caused a bit of condensation to appear under the glass.  Maybe I need to experiment.  The other tip was using a small amount of super glue on the back side of one of the glass & paper assemblies so that the two layers were truly joined together before soldering began.  I can see how this would keep it together tightly so the layers don't shift while wrapping with the copper tape, but still worry about 1) condensation from the glue if not 100% dry and 2) how the glue might affect the paper in terms of staining or eventually showing through.  Guess there's only one way to find out.

Just to see what was out there, I visited a number of Etsy shops that offered soldered jewelry.  I don't like to bash other artist's work, but there was some stuff out that that was just not what I expected to see for sale.  Was that polite enough?  Then there was another artist whose work was just about flawless and quite inspiring.  Clearly, it can be done!  Now to figure out how.  After I work at that for a while, I'm going to go back to fabric which doesn't make me bleed or sob in frustration.

Keep it Moving...

Whenever I discover that there is a chip or smudge in my rarely painted nails, I figure I can just keep  my hands moving and no one will see the goof.  The same goes for when I let myself go too long between salon visits and the "snow on the roof" is visible in the part of my hair.  With a rub of brown eye shadow and my hair down and moving with me, no one notices the flaw.

Then there's my recent quilt.  I'm not quite sure how much I can flap that sucker in the breeze so that no one notices the flaws.  Can you see the mistake?

There's no such thing as a project in progress without a cat involved in it somehow.  Charlotte wanted to be sure there remained plenty of wrinkles as I tried to smooth the quilt on the floor.

 I'd like to think I'm being to hard on myself, but what a bonehead move on my part.  This photo explains it all...

This note was added AFTER I realized the mistake I'd made, having put the blue tape on the machine the last time I made a quilt, about two years ago, without a note as to why.  Oh my.

Having a new quilt pattern and all of the fabric I thought I'd needed got me in a great and creative mood.  Well, as creative as you can be when you are working from a pattern someone else designed with the fabric matching that used in making the pattern sample.  Just the act of measuring and cutting and assembling requires a lot of focus, leaving the brain unable to fret about other things in life that may not be going so well.  For those who don't sew, this won't mean a thing.  For those that do, I'm sure there will be a lot of chuckling going on in a minute.  This fancy, shmancy Bernina my husband bought for me a few years ago has a great new feature - the hole in the foot plate is a full 9mm wide and with the push of the little white button on the front, the needle can be bumped left or right of the usual center position and remain in place until the machine is turned off (it re-centers when the machine is turned back on).  Since I was using a wide presser foot and quilting with the usual 1/4" seam allowance, I wanted to use the right edge of the presser foot as my guide so that I could clearly see it.  In my infinite wisdom, the last time I made a quilt I simply dropped the needle and tapped that little white button until it was positioned so that it created a perfectly placed 1/4" seam with the fabric lined up along the right side of the foot.  Follow me?  Of course, I was brilliant and put down the blue painters tape, with the left tape edge marking the 1/4" seam edge IF the needle were centered, and the drawn line marking the 1/4" seam edge if the needle were bumped to the right twice and the fabric lined up with the edge of the presser foot.  Only this time around, I forgot the part about bumping the needle over (thus this new note to my goober self).

When I started to put the first pieces together - the black and white horizontal striped section stitched to the vertical coloured and white stripes - I was horrified to see that the colored strips were significantly more narrow, by about 1-1/2 inches.  How could that be?  I thought, "dumb directions!" and double checked the math.  The math added up.  My quilt squares didn't.  I flipped the quilt over and started measure the seams and realized they were larger than 1/4" because I, the nitwit that forgot why the 1/4" mark isn't at the left edge of the tape, had used the foot as a guide without moving the needle to the right.  Every bloody seam hogged up another 1/8" more of less of fabric.  Lots of strips meant the loss of lots of fabric.  O.M.G.  I could either take apart (how many components are there?  Thirty?) every assembled square, or just cut the black & white segments to fit the width of the thirty that were too small and call it a flippin' crib quilt instead of a lap quilt.

Lesson learned.  I learned how to make a crib quilt.

There were other mistakes and errors along the way, but I am simply going to consider them as learning experiences, make notes so that I don't repeat those mistakes, and consider this is just part of the re-learning curve. 

While I'm looking at these photos again, I should point out that Charlotte is not a poodle as her tail would suggest.  She is usually a long haired cat that suffered with the most miserable knotting of her fluffy fur, so she was subjected to what the vet refers to as a "lion cut."  Alas, the lion's cheeks were trimmed a little lopsided, so she looks like her head is tweaked a bit toward the right.  Her cut also provided a stunning view of her need for kitty Spanx.  How can a young cat that has never had kittens have cleavage like that?!?  She puts most dairy cows to shame.  We are trying to exercise her and help her with nature's tummy tuck, hoping she doesn't notice things like my son spotting her for the first time after she got home, doubling over and laughing so hard that he merely bounced with no sound coming out.  Poor Charlotte.  The indignity of it all!

Tomorrow I start on the back of the quilt.  At this point, I don't see any point in continuing the silly practice of skipping wine while I sew.  Clearly, it couldn't have hurt.  You just can't tell from this photo that the top row of black bars is narrower than the others.  I need to flap that quilt a little faster, THEN I'll take a sip.

I Stink at Math!

This quilt project has turned into the biggest headache ever, either because I just can't do math or because my cutting and measuring skills simply blow.  I'm donating this quilt, buying materials while paying enormous graduate school tuition for my daughter.  The fabric is relatively expensive ($10/yd at most suppliers), so I decided to reduce the size of the squares, reducing the total size of a quilt to that of a lap quilt vs. one for a bed.  I thought I did a good job of the math, and even ran it past my math whiz of a husband and all seemed well and good.

It took quite a while to map out all of the cuts of the dozen different fabrics.  I sketched out a plan, double checked the numbers, triple checked the measurements and newly re-sized pieces, then started cutting and assembling.  As I started to square up each assembled piece, I discovered to my horror that they just didn't add up.  The "squares" aren't all squares, and the amount some of them are off is just inexplicable.  Each strip is the right size, the seams are the right size, I used a walking foot and marked the foot plate so that I wouldn't forget and slip to a standard sewing seam allowance (having spent more years making garments than anything else).  I measured carefully, cut carefully with my quilting rules and fresh rotary cutter.  What in the world did I do wrong?!?  Arghhhh!  I've made other quilts that required so much more precision (the first one ever was one of those kaleidoscope whack-and-stacks and it turned out beautiful!), and this one is just a bunch of stupid rectangles.  Seriously, what an epic failure of a job.

This big pile of lemon squares has got to become lemonade.  If I cut the squares smaller, the finished quilt will have a more modern and asymmetrical look and I think it'll work really well.  This is what the quilt was supposed to look like before I messed with the pattern.  This is NOT what it will look like when I'm finished tweaking the "squares."  I may be too humiliated to post the finished project.  I'm glad the folks at the auction will never know what it was originally to look like.  What the heck, I've never been a fan of symmetry.  It might come out even more fun.  That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

Note to self:  Just spend the money and make the full sized quilt until math skills improve!

Ruined Art

Big sighs.  I put on the final touch to the first of two figurative pieces for the fundraiser/auction, and I think I've ruined it.  I tried too hard to make do with something I wasn't thrilled with and ended up making a right-up-front mess that I don't think I can fix.  I suppose I should focus on the fact that the only part I did like is salvageable - the head and the wire piece around the throat.  But the body is now wrecked because I just NEEDED to attach that clay hand to the front and the only thing I could think to use was E-6000 adhesive.  I suppose it wouldn't have been a totally moronic notion if the hand had been flat and if I'd not looked away and let my own hand slip and smear goo on the front.

More big sighs.

Back to the drawing board.  That and a glass of wine.  Two points, here I come.  My fellow WW'ers will know what that means.  ;-) 

Publish Post