Monday, March 11, 2019

A TWO HOUR JOB

Tomorrow is the day our Jacob's Ladder quilts for the R.D. quilt show need to be handed in.  Cathy will take the all to Red Deer for us, so that saves us an hour long drive there and back.  The hanging sleeve needed to be applied to my quilt yet, so this morning that was the priority.

The R.D. Quilt Show had posted explicit directions on line as to how to create the hanging sleeve they required.  They were very different from what I was used to, but I got to work over the weekend and made a sleeve according to their directions.  This morning I hand stitched the sleeve to the back of the quilt, also according to their directions.  I used hidden stitches and the whole job took 2 hours!  But it's finished.  I just need to lint-roller the quilt to pick up all the loose threads and then it's ready to go.




The sleeve forms a "D" shape.  That's what this part sticking up is.  The reason for that is that they use big rods (dowels?) to hang all the quilts.  I can surely understand how they need to have the sleeves uniform.  Hanging that many quilts is an enormous job!  You should go to their web site, Red Deer Quilt Show.  There you can find all their instructions and also, interestingly, all the quilts that were shown in '17 and '18.

I want to give a nod of thanks to my friend Elaine M. whose exceedingly helpful hint I remembered when I had much trouble with my sewing thread tangling.  The hint she brought to our club is this: When threading the needle for hand sewing, pass the thread through the needle eye, then bring the thread around and again pass it through the eye in the same direction.  The needle is able to slide along the thread.  Useful if you want to stitch with a single thread, but when stitching with a double thread, do no knot the thread before sewing.  Just take a few back stitches before starting.  This is a WONDERFUL cure for thread that wants to tangle.  As soon as I changed to this method of threading the needle I had absolutely NO MORE trouble with tangled threads as I stitched the sleeve to the back of the quilt.  KUDOS TO YOU, ELAINE!

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