Patience and Persistence

A Tale of Three Machines

If you are like me, there are some projects you put away and when you get back to them you don't remember where you were or why you stopped.  (Note to Self:  make notes to self.)  Such is Weaver Fever a design by Jackie Robinson.

This one goes back to my early days in quilting--around 2004.  I remember the retreat where we were all working on it.  The teacher (my friend Nancy) had the process very organized.  (I also remember Doris (no longer with us) whose quilt ended up in reverse because she turned her table around!)

When I was looking for "easy" projects to take to last week's retreat I looked in the project box and it looked like all I needed to do was sew the blocks together.  Easy-peasy.  NOT!  Here's what I think happened ... 

Initially one of my fabric selections was blah and needed to be replaced.  

That yellowy blue in the middle just wasn't singing the same song!  Thankfully, I had only subcut the stripsets for a couple of test blocks at that earlier retreat.  So the project stalled while I disassembled six of the ten strips sets and inserted the new fabric.  

By the time I got back to assembling blocks a few years later, I was using a new "traveling" machine.  Both my original Pfaff and the new Janome required moving the needle to get a good quarter inch and neither was the same -- nor did I always remember to reset the needle position (my bad!). With four to five vertical seams and nine horizontal seams in each block, it was inevitable that every block was a different size.  And now I'm using a third machine.   It's no wonder the project went into Timeout ... for years!

To make a long story short, I realized that this is basically a variation of bargello which normally requires consistent seams.  The advantage of the block technique in this pattern is the only critical measurement is the width of a block so I could trim wider blocks to a consistent measurement.  

But I also had blocks that were longer than others!

But as long as the blocks in any given row were the same length, it wasn't a problem!  In the end I had to disassemble only one row of 5 blocks to trim them to a consistent width. The rest I trimmed before putting them together.  I'm still contemplating borders, but here is my current status.

At 50" x 70" before borders, it will be a nice throw.  I think this one is staying with me.