The quilt that I am not writing about anymore is finished. I took it off the longarm a week ago. Quilting had provided a serious problem because after the first few lines I realized that the longarm machine did not like the pieces of reflecting fabric that are included in the quilt. The thread kept breaking, and after the third or fourth time I decided, I would do that in a controlled manner. I interrupted the line at each piece of reflector fabric. However, I also decided that I did not want to do on-the-spot-securing of thread when stopping or beginning. At that point not really realizing just how many threads that needed to be sunk this method would produce. I mean, I know I had taken that decision consciously. But I did curse myself when I took the quilt off the machine – no, even earlier, when the stopping and starting again added so many more movements to be done and actions to be taken to the exercise of adjusting the locks.
And the deadline for Q=A=Q approaching, and sinking threads not being my favorite part of finishing a quilt… Definitely an activity I would outsource immediately if I had the financial means or the human resources department in the background that could deal with that!
At some
point I was near to panicking and complained to Kathy about it in our mails.
She wisely suggested I pull the threads to the back, proceed with the facings,
have it photographed on time and deal with sinking them at a later time. This
advice grounded me to a certain degree, because it made me think about how much time
it would cost me to pull the threads to the back in comparison to sinking them
right away. I had been smart enough to time myself for one complete process of sinking. I
could do one double set of threads in one minute and 15 seconds. That was a
single process which went normally well, no difficulties, tangles, breaks. So I
figured make it one minute and a half to two minutes for an averaging calculation,
and I briefly surveyed the number of threads left. Multiply by – and it added
up to close to four hours of sinking threads. At the beginning of a hot Sunday
without family disturbances – that seemed doable. And it was, by Sunday evening
it was done. Now with the facings I did indeed take the liberty to finish them so far
as to make a photo possible, but the sleeve and upper and lower facings still
need to be attached. Nevertheless, I declare it finished.
But somehow entries and I seem to be on a strange footing – because the photographer sent me a small file only, 72 pixels, not enough MB. Which I discovered yesterday evening when I wanted to get the entry process done with. I wrote an email and could only hope that they had not messed up with the camera settings when taking the photo, and that they would be able to send me a decent file before the deadline ran out. Luckily this worked out, I have managed to register with the new entry system (compared to last time entry a few years ago), and although the system wanted to circle me through the process several times and I thought I had lost everything and would need to re-type everything, in the end it worked. (I don’t need to mention that my printer did not want to print the receipt at first, but by now I am smart enough not to close that page until I have indeed seen the correctly printed page.) I am set on entering this quilt in all the upcoming possibilities of entering, and there are at least 5 I know of currently, could be more) until it gets accepted somewhere.
Off to new horizons, though. It felt good to complete a piece, in a relatively short time, and not a small one at that (58 by 63 inches). I have started on a new idea. For one never knows – this one might be accepted right away and then I might want to have others to enter in the following calls for entry.
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