day 12

Today I woke up around 9:30 and headed over to Debs house with a few of my dresses that needed to be adjusted. I tried them on for her, and we pinned the areas that needed to be tightened. Deb did all of the sewing today, but it was really cool to watch how she fixed my dresses for me using different techniques for each one. I hopefully will be able to do this on my own the next time I need to alter a dress or another piece of clothing by using the sewing techniques that I have learned throughout the past two weeks. I finished the evening working on my self reflection. Tomorrow I will make my poster board.

day 11

Since I already completed my quilt, today was a pretty laid back day. I drove down to Concord to return some fabric and quilt binding that I did not use. I also began working on my self evaluation. Tomorrow I will meet with Deb early again just to look things over. I am also going to bring a couple dresses over that I am hoping to alter with Deb's help.

Weekly Reflection- Week 2

I had another enjoyable week working on my quilt. Just like last week, Deb was a huge help and showed me many new cutting, ironing and sewing techniques. Deb showed me how to hand stitch, as well as use both straight and zig zag stitches with the machine. My favorite was hand stitching especially because it is a very valuable skill to have in life.
I am very satisfied with my final product, and despite a few bumps along the way I am surprised at how smooth it went. I think that Deb and I were so successful do to her experience and knowledge on what would be the best type of quilt to make with our given materials and fabrics. She helped me tremendously along the way by showing me exactly what should be done, and allowing me to do it in a way that worked best for me.
I put forth my best efforts in order to make the quilt appear to the best of my ability. Throughout the sewing process especially, I made a few mistakes that I could have left alone, but Deb and I decided that I should go back and fix them in order to make the quilt look its best. If I were to come back to see the quilt hanging and notice these mistakes, I realized that it will really bother me if I leave them untouched. I figured that although someone else may not notice these, I wanted to go back and fix them in order to feel more accomplished with my own work. At times, I became very frustrated with myself when making silly mistakes such as sewing together both sides of the quilt without knowing it, or melting the fusing paper while ironing it. An example of this is when I didn’t realize that I had a layer of the quilt folded under the layer that I was sewing, causing me to have to go back and rip out all of the seems and start over. Another mistake that I made was when I put all of the pins in surrounding the border facing the wrong direction, so I had to go back and re pin every single one of them. Deb would simple say “take a deep breath” and she shared many stories of mistakes she had made on projects while sewing. Deb remained very patient with me and helped me fix these simple mistakes.
Throughout this week, I have become very confident with using a sewing machine. I feel that I have learned a large amount about quilting and sewing. Sewing is a great skill to have in life and I am happy to feel confident in doing it on my own. I hope to be able to make another jersey quilt in the future. I look forward to presenting my quilt to the community on Thursday!

Day 10- quilt completed!

I worked hard and long today, but the good news is that I finished the quilt! I had to finish sewing the border, so I did that as soon as I arrived at Debs around 9:30. She then taught me how to hand stitch each corner of the quilt. This took about an hour to complete all four corners. Once I finished this, I sewed three rings onto the back of the quilt which will be used to hang it. I then took scrap pieces of the green and white fabric and folded over their edges to iron straight. I bonded them together with the fusing sheets and signed my name and class on it. I then fused this to the quilt with the heat and bond paper. I finally sewed this onto the quilt for a finishing touch. I worked for about 4 hours today. Above are pictures of rings that I sew on in order to hang it and a sneak peak of the final quilt! Come to my presentation on Thursday to see the final product!

Day 9

Today was a good day. Everything seemed to go well as I didn't run into too many problems or obstacles at all. I began by tying small ties throughout my quilt in order to hold the batting in place with the fabric. I then went through and trimmed all of the ties. Next I began sewing around the border, removing the pins as I came to them. Deb and I did notice that we put some of the pins in facing the wrong direction, so we did go back and switch them in order to make the sewing process go smoother and to protect me from getting pricked more! After about two and a half hours, I took a lunch break and then continued sewing for about another hour. I only have one more side to sew on the quilt and then I will have to sew on the rings to hang it tomorrow.

Day 8

When I arrived at Deb's house today we began by laying out my quilt on top of a measuring board. She then showed me a trick on how to make the bottom of the cut fabric straight by pulling the pieces of fabric across the bottom causing it to fray. On most fabrics this will cause a completely straight line, but it didn't seem to be working very well with the fabric that we were using as it continued to bunch and tear. We then decided to use the lines on the measuring board as our guide, so I followed these while cutting the fabric to form a straight line. I left 4 inches of white fabric on the top and bottom of my quilt, and 3 inches on the sides. Once this was completed, I sewed about an inch along the border of the green fabric to use as a guide of where to fold and iron. This made the fabric look straighter and smoother. Once I was done ironing, I laid the green border fabric on its front side. I then placed the batting on top of it. Finally, I placed the white fabric with the jerseys sewn onto it on top of the background fabric and the batting. Deb and I then folded the green fabric over the white edges to create the border. We pinned this down tightly, so it wont move at all for when I begin to sew it on tomorrow. I forgot to take a picture of what I have accomplished today and I realize that it may sound frantic and confusing without a visual, so I will make sure to upload one tomorrow!

day 7

I worked for about four hours today. Once I arrived at Debs house I continued sewing the jerseys onto the white background fabric. Karl stopped by to check things out and mentioned that the jerseys with gold on them are about 30 years old! He said that Proctor switched to using black rather than gold in their uniforms around the early 80's. I found that interesting. Once I finished sewing all of the jerseys, I laid out my quilt to see if I had made any mistakes. Deb and I did find a few places where the jersey wasn't perfectly straight which caused it to bulge a little. I took out the seams with the seam ripper and re-sew these areas. This was a little frustrating as I found myself making silly mistakes such as sewing the background fabric on top of each other without realizing it, but after about two hours I fixed these mistakes and finished sewing the jerseys on. I spent the next two hours of my day "cleaning up" the quilt. I cut all loose yarn on both sides of the quilt and added a no fray liquid around the edges of each jersey as we began to notice them fraying a little. The quilt is coming along quite nicely and tomorrow we will begin sewing the border.