Tag Archives: T5BW

African King, Making Repairs, and Procrastination

I have a client who recently returned from a trip to Ghana, and she brought this wonderful piece of fabric back for me to turn into a king sized quilt as a wedding gift for a friend. I would never, EVER have dreamed of taking this on before I got Mr. Darcy, so I can absolutely say with confidence that having him has made an impact on my business in a very positive way. This fabric panel is hand-stamped; it is not printed on-grain (nor is the design straight!) and so squaring it up is a bit of a challenge.  I just did the best that I could so as not to lose too much of it in the squaring, because I need to add borders to bring it up to king size. The panel measured about 63″ x 95″. The client wanted a narrow green border all the way around, and then a creamy white border along the sides for the drop. The first border is 4-1/2″. Even though I cut this on the lengthwise grain, I still had to piece the longer sections because my yardage wasn’t quite long enough: For the white border, this is cut at about 15″ on the straight grain. This is not pieced as the yardage was enough.  This brought the quilt up to about 102″ x 113″. Even though this quilt didn’t need a lot of piecing, it still took several hours to work on.  Pressing a panel that large plus all the yardage for the borders, squaring it, cutting out all the pieces, and pinning the borders on is pretty time consuming.  I’m finding that the sewing isn’t what takes the longest – it’s all the prep work before & in between! My client selected a beautiful chocolate batik fabric that I had to special order from Sew Batik.  There’s about 6 yards of this fabric, and it had to be washed in Synthrapol to remove excess dye & shrink it. Good thing I have a giant washer! So imagine my dismay at finding a large hole right smack in the middle of this fabric while I was pressing it:  Sometimes this kind of thing happens with yardage, and you have to make a call about whether or not the fabric is salvageable.  I thought showing you how to undertake a repair in a ripped fabric would be very illustrative, so I’m taking this as a teachable moment.  You’ll need to make your own decision about your own projects and whether or not you can live with a repair in the fabric. Since this is a hand-dyed fabric, I needed to find a piece of the fabric that mimicked the coloration in the surrounding area as closely as possible. I cut a square patch that was about 1″ bigger than the hole, all the way around. This fabric I adhered to a piece of Misty Fuse (if you ever use Misty Fuse, always keep the little trimmings as they come in handy for little things like this!) MF is an extremely lightweight fusible that really doesn’t change the hand of the fabric very much, so it’s great for things like this.  I then fused the piece over the hole, matching the coloration, and stitched with a very narrow zigzag around the edge.  Here’s a up close photo of the repair: I know you’re thinking – that’s so obvious! I can see it! But that photo was taken about 2″ from the patch. Here’s one from about a foot back: And here is one from about 3 feet back: Can you see it?  When I took it off the sewing machine after making the repair, I couldn’t find it, and I had to literally drape it over myself like a tent and hold it up to the light to find where the patch was so that I could photograph it. So you tell me… given what you’ve seen, would you use this in a customer quilt, or no?  Sew Batik doesn’t take returns once you cut into a fabric (I’d already hacked off a section to make the binding) so I’d have to reorder. Well, other than the snag with the backing, I already know exactly what thread I’m using and how I’m going to quilt it, so I don’t have any issues there – I just need a break in my schedule to quilt it. Now, whenever I get super busy, stressed out, or I just don’t feel like working on all the pressing projects that demand my attention (like now, I’m supposed to be going to bed “early” but I think that just means before midnight) I work on something fairly pointless and unimportant.  I have been collecting black & white fat quarters and fat eighths for a while now, and I had stuck them in a basket and called them a “project”.  So I finally cut them all up into squares and rectangles of various sizes, so now this project is ready to be used for leaders & enders!  It’s a Take 5 pattern with a twist. To endless possibilities, Ebony

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