First attempt finished….

Last time I showed what I’d been up to with the patchwork I started. Well, I finally (whew!) finished the top – my first ever patchwork “block”. To begin, I had to sort out all my cut pieces. This was no small task, but I just pinned them to a piece of unbleached muslin in order to make sure that I’d cut the right pieces and that they would actually make the design I wanted. In this case, I made a well-known design called “Martha Washington’s Star”.

These are the pieces pinned on the muslin. My first attempts made for some very sloppy cutting. I learned, by doing it, that a) I should cut no more than two layers at a time, otherwise the cutter struggles and you end up with a mess. I was cutting up to eight layers at once and lived to regret it! And b) I should be more careful when cutting generally. I ended up shaving my plastic template, cutting unevenly by rolling the cutter back and forth instead of one direction, and not using a ruler to guide the rotary cutter. Next time I will take it more slowly and use a lot more care to cut the pattern precisely. I cut these pieces out at a crop at someone’s house where I had limited space…. it would have been better to cut them out where I could spread the fabric out and cut more carefully.

But, my new sewing machine performed brilliantly… although it took nearly an entire afternoon to get the bobbin wound and the needle threaded! Ah, it was all a “learning experience”. However, I used to write instruction manuals for a living and I know what makes a good instruction manual. This machine’s manual is awful. The index is almost useless and information is scattered in a very haphazard way, with information about a single procedure sometimes scattered pages apart!

Anyway, here is the finished piece.

Close inspection will show all the faults, and there are many!! The ladies in my quilting club said it was a good first effort and they were surprised that I chose a fairly difficult pattern to use as my first one.

As you can see from the diagram, there were lots of little bits in the center that made it very fiddly. I sewed a couple of the blocks on the wrong seam, or even sewed one part in backwards and upside down(!) and had to rip the seam out and sew it again.

One of the things that I’ve really found interesting is the history behind some of the traditional patterns. Martha Washington’s Star is credited by some to actually have been a design by Martha Dandridge Custis Washington, the wife of America’s first president, George Washington. She was an avid needlecrafter. Many of the patterns came from the American Civil War era (1861-1865) and I found some fascinating historical bits about many of them. I even ordered a DVD set from the Kentucky Quilt Project titled “Why Quilts Matter: History, Art & Politics”. It’s a nine-part documentary series on two DVDs. It arrived very quickly but I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet.

So… so far, so good. My machine works well and is fun to use. I’m still loving patchwork. And I’m learning a whole lot along the way.