Scribbles in the Dark

no quilting this weekend - lauren is at dragoncon. *poutpout* i've never been, but it looks amazing.

anyway, i technically am at a point where i don't need to use any of lauren's stuff to work on the quilt, but i don't really want to work alone - i like spending time with her, and working on the quilt is a good reason. it's become our sunday thing.

last week i sewed the last edge of the stabiliser onto the tshirt layer. it's doing this freakish puckering thing, which lauren says is because the layers stretch differently. (thank god i didn't use jersey or it would have been hellishly worse!) i also rolled out the batting last weekend, to decide if a really want to use it. the answer is yes - it makes the whole thing so soft and fluffy and squishy! it feels more like a quilt as opposed to just a blanket, now. the challenge is that the batting is technically 90" wide, and my quilt right now is about 95" wide. but batting stretches! so, after fighting with the batting for a while, i finally got that pinned in place. i ended up pinning it a little in from the edge on two sides, rather than stretch it too much. but i was dumb about it, so now what i need to do is go fix it. i pinned the batting from the bottom of the layer, which means i have to have access to the bottom in order to get those pins out. but i can't take those pins out until i'm ready to do the actual quilting, 'cause that's the only way the batting is going to be attached, in some places. and at that point the green back layer will be pinned over top of the batting, all the way to the edges, and i won't have bottom-side access anymore. so now i need to go back and pin the batting in place from the top of the quilt. and i need to lay it out flat to do it.

lauren and i went to a church off 290 last week to meet up with her sca palls and do crafty things. lots of people were working with cloth projects, but there was other stuff happening too - cording, copper, wood, etc. one guy was doing the calligraphy for some illuminated texts, and it was beautiful. i commandeered the stage, since it was wide enough to spread out my whole quilt flat to work on it. that was very nice.

so, presuming i continue to have free time on weekends (which is no sure thing; i'm amazed it's lasted this long) i am getting close to being done with this thing. hurrah!

uh-oh.

so you know how i'm making a quilt? and i have a square design using a 7x7 grid of 13" tiles, which ends up being 91"x91"? and when i bought material i planned on having a 91"x91" unfinished dimension to work with?

well, my quilt is decidedly NOT 91"x91". it's more like 7'11" (95") on the vertical, instead of 7'7" like it's supposed to be. and it's about 95" on the horizontal, too. which means i have an extra four inches of material to cover in each direction. i probably didn't sew my seams wide enough.

aaaaaand my bolt of fabric is only about 39"-40" wide, instead of the 43"-ish i was planning on.

damnit.

SO!! let's see if i need to go back to the fabric store or not.

~

ETA: oh yeah, i'm boned.

so it turns out that the green fabric is narrower than the brown. i do have about a 44" width on the brown; it's just the green that's 39". so, doing the math, i need another 48" length of my green to finish out the back of the quilt - i'm going to err on the side of caution and get a full yard and a half. and i'm a little short on the brown as well - i'll need another 24" or so of that - so i'm gonna pick up another yard there as well.

in other weirdness, i supposedly got 200" of both colors of fabric, and supposedly cut two 95" strips off of each of them. but somehow i ended up with 7" extra of green, and 14" extra of brown. in pure math, i should have had 10" of each. i have no vaping clue what happened there.

so... back to the store with me. *headdesk*

~

ETA: how to tie a quilt - http://www.quiltbug.com/Articles/tying-a-quilt.htm

SO!!! i've been doing the math for my quilt, and here's what i've learned:

for the back and the batting, each, i'll need three pieces of 8' fabric (assuming they're 3' wide; sometimes fabric comes in 2-yard widths on the bolt, i think). for the borders, i can get one piece of fabric 3' x 8'6" and that will be enough to make all four pieces of the border, assuming the border is 3" wide on each side of the quilt.

so that's a lot of fabric. i think i'm supposed to be getting jersey, since i didn't use interfacing on the front of the quilt (which is still not done.....), instead of cotton like i was originally planning. but i figure i can ask at the fabric store and they'll tell me what they recommend.

and i need to buy a box of pins, since i left lauren's pins at her place last weekend and i don't have any of my own. i haven't got any pinning done this week because of that. *sadface*

OFF TO THE FABRIC STORE!!!!

~

ETA: so there's a LOT of fabric in a fabric store. this is a new experience for me. :D

well, i couldn't find any jersey, but i did find just about everything else, including about eight million different kinds of cotton. so i guess i'm using cotton?

but i don't know if i should - because tshirts are all stretchy, right, and cotton is not so much with the stretchy. so i'd have to be careful pinning and measuring and what-not, or i'd end up mis-aligning everything. but i suppose if i pin it right, it could be okay. i really need some expert advice on this.

and i need to decide quickly, because the "broadcloth" is on sale this weekend, and i figure that if it's acceptable for use as batting, then that's cheap batting right there.

i guess i can leave the decision about the rest of it until later, but i'm not really sure what colors i want, and that's the real kicker. i'm planning on doing a solid-colored back, and then the border all in one material, whatever that ends up being. there's this stuff called calico, which so far as i can tell is like cotton with a pattern on it. it's kind of expensive, but some of the patterns are neat. but maybe having a patterned material would be too distracting with my color-blocks of t-shirts. so say i just do a solid color. jim recommended navy blue and forest green, which are colors we both like. i dunno.

in other news, i got PINS!!! so now i can pin together the rest of the columns, in preparation for sewing. sewing tomorrow? *hopeful*

quilting update!!!

yesterday i went over to lauren's apartment and officially started on my tshirt quilt, and i continued today. i'm now at the point of no return: i cut things up. *le gasp*

so here's the plan right now:

1 - pick out all the tshirts that i'll need, with the correct number of designs given the size of quilt and size of tile that i want to use. done
2 - cut the tshirts into halves and remove the sleeves. done (note: most tshirts don't have seams on the side, so you just have to lay them flat and guess.)
3 - make a tile frame. done
4 - cut out all the tiles. done
5 - arrange the tiles in whatever design i want to use (i'm probably going to put the oversized ones in the corners, with smaller ones making up the difference of the adjacent tiles). done on july 20
6 - patch any tiles that need patching. done on july 25
7 - sew the tiles together in rows or columns, and then attach them all together. done on august 8
8 - buy (or make from recycled scraps) the material for the batting, backing, and borders (jersey?). done on august 8
8b - assemble the pieces of the layers. done
9* - sew the tshirt layer and stabiliser edges together. done on august 29
10 - tie-stitch the three layers together.
11 - sew on the border.

so despite the fact that i have been very productive in the past few days, i still have a loooooooot to do. and, um, maybe five more weekends to do it in. fml.

a bit more research about quilts...

from http://interiordec.about.com/od/beds/a/bedsizes.htm -

Comforter Sizes
* Twin--68 x 86 inches (or 173 x 218 cm)
* Full/Queen--86 x 86 inches (or 218 x 218 cm)
* King/California King--100 x 90 inches (or 254 x 229 cm)

so i think what i'm going for is a double aka 'full' bed quilt.

the tile jenni gave me is for a 13"x13" square of tshirt, which fits all but one of the designs i want to keep thus far. if i'm going for a double then i need 6 or 7 rows and columns of shirts. 7x7=49, and 7 units of 13" each would be 91 inches before the border (i've definitely decided not to do sashing, after seeing how well jenni's tshirt quilt looks without it). so a 7x7 at 13" gives me a 91"x91" quilt, plus a few more inches on each side for the border.

so. 49 tiles in a 7x7 square. round to 50 and half that is 25 tshirts that i'll need, minimum, assuming i use the front AND the back of all but one of said tshirts. right now i have 14 that i've picked out, with another two or three i'd be fine to give to the quilt, but that still leaves a good 8 shirts that i'm missing. and that assumes that i use both sides of every shirt, including the blank sides, of which i have about five right now.

however, one of my tshirts has a design that is longer than 13", which i want to keep whole in the quilt, so that one can take up two tiles, with either a smaller design or a blank piece to make up the difference of the second tile. if i do a smaller design, then i'm still using two designs in two tiles, just spaced differently. if i do a blank piece then i'll have 48 designs instead of 49, since that design will take up two tiles. i think i'll still need 25 shirts, though, because i'll have 48 designs in 49 tiles.... right?

on top of that, there are two or three designs that i actively don't want to keep in the quilt, so that loses me a few tiles of the tshirts i have set aside already. so, let's assume i don't include the blanks and i don't include those undesirable designs. of the 14 shirts i have set aside so far... there are two designs i don't want to keep, and four shirts that have one side blank. that knocks out six pieces. so of 14 shirts (28 sides) i actually have 22 pieces for the quilt. but one of those is the double-length, so if i do a blank piece to make up the length, then i actually have 23 pieces. so: 49-23=26. so i need at least 26 more pieces, maybe 27 - that's about 13 more shirts. if i include blanks then that number goes down.

here's a thought: if i use a 14" tile, then... a 6x6 @ 14" would be 6x14"=84" to a side, plus say a 3" border on each side, then that comes to 90"x90" at the end. that could work - it's about 7" smaller than a 7x7 @13", but it's still bigger than the size listed on that website. and then i only need 36 pieces, too: 36-22=14 pieces, or 7 more shirts. i still have the problem of that one design being too long - it's something like 16" i think - but i can solve it in the same way as in a 13" tile.

i like this much better.