Flamingos: Finally Finished

After writing yesterday's post, I headed back downstairs and found this pile in the living room.

It's hard to say who, in that image, is the laziest, but I think Sadie wins the prize.

I was on my way to finish up the shop names for the Shop Hop quilt. All finished now.

I won't make these Shop Hop blocks for a week or two, but finishing them meant it was time to trace out the next block for the Sundress quilt. This will be the 6th of the 12 dress blocks.

It's going to be a study in French knots. Not all of those dots are going to be French knots. I have some dots to mark the points of another stitch, but there are plenty of knots as well. And this being Sunday, I'll be linking up to Sunday Slow Stitching with Kathy this morning.

After that, I headed into the sewing room. You might remember that I had a couple of problem children to attend to before I could finish sewing the flamingo sections together. Recall this image:

There was a big mismatch of seams where the pink arrow is. In this technique, seams are intentionally mismatched. Someone once told me that when Ruth McDowell came up with this technique, it was partly because she had trouble matching seams as in traditional quilting. I don't know if that's true, but whatever the reason, it makes these rather complicated quilts more forgiving when it comes to the piecing together of all the odd shapes. Either way, I looked again at my piecing, and studied the pattern, and I couldn't see that I'd turned anything the wrong direction, or misplaced any of the pieces. The only explanation I can come up with is this bit of fudging I did when I drew out the original pattern.

When I went through a labeled the pieces for sewing order, I can recall looking at that little piece and deciding to ignore it...and, yes, I was fudging a little, thinking it wouldn't matter. And, honestly, I don't know if that's why this ended up so far off or not, but it doesn't really matter in the end. So here's what I did to fix it.

It was easy enough to remake one of the pieces, and it meant unsewing just one seam since the piece was, thankfully, at the end of the section. I trimmed all around the template, leaving a 1/4-inch seam allowance, but I left all the length on the right side (where the problem area was).

Then, I sewed it back on, leaving the excess there on the left.

Then I lined up my ruler along the edge of the section, and trimmed it off.

And there. No harm done. You won't tell anyone, will you?

Okay, and then there was the area above the beak on the pink flamingo where the pink stretched on to infinity and beyond (where the blue arrow is).

And, again, these seams are mismatched. Here's the pattern along with the original photograph. Possibly, I might have drawn a line at the tip of that triangle and made a little background piece there, but that would have been an awfully fiddly little piece.

So, I pressed the quilt real well and laid my ruler out across it, measuring where the seam line would be, and how much of that piece would actually be visible. And that was acceptable to my eyes.

So, when I sewed the section to the one above, it ended up looking like this. And it's fine by me.

So, then I proceeded to sew all the sections together and to remove the paper templates from the back. When all the sections were sewn together, it looked like this.

Next, I squared it up, added the borders, and voila! Flamingos. Finished. Finally.

It ends up 36.5 inches x 42 inches, which meant I could cut a whole piece for the back. (I love it when I can get away with no piecing for the quilt back.) Also, I cut the binding strips, there on the left in the image below.

These have a way of taking over my life once I get going on them, and so it was good to have it finished. Now, I can pick through the bombed out ruins of the remaining parts of my life and find my way back to the light.

We're having a neighbor over for dinner tomorrow, and so today I'll be focusing on cooking some things ahead. I'm making a dessert and a salad, and that usually means a trip to the grocery store. Also, speaking of the "bombed out ruins," I should probably get caught up on some housework. If there's still time left in the day, I want to work on the Rainbow Scrap Challenge quilt.

Last month I was trying to finish them in the final hours of the month. I'll start them earlier this month so I can work under less pressure. I'm doing the green blocks of March and the teal blocks of June. If I can finish those, I'll be caught up on the challenge, and I can slow down a little bit.

 We've had a rainy weekend here, and it's been kind of nice. We're expecting the sunshine to return tomorrow.