Fussy Cutting is Not my Jam

I do this thing—and I know I do it, which doesn’t make it any less likely to happen—where I grossly underestimate how long it will take me to make something. I can read through a quilt pattern and assemble it in my head at the same time. My brain therefore estimates that the amount of time it will take to actually make the quilt is equal to the amount of time it took me to read the pattern and assemble it in my head.

I seem to be the only transcriptionist working this week, which is fine, but it meant that I did about twice as much work yesterday as I normally do. The only other task I had on the schedule was putting the next border onto the commission quilt. I thought that would take an hour. It took three.

This entire quilt design is built around a batik fabric featuring dogsleds in a line:

That’s appropriate given that this kit was purchased at a quilt store in Alaska. But parts of the pattern—including the border I was working on—indicate for the dogsled fabric to be “fussy cut,” where only a specific portion of the fabric is used. I don’t like fussy cutting, as a rule. It wastes a tremendous amount of fabric.

The pattern instructions called for 5-1/2” wide strips of the dogsled fabric to be cut so that a single line of dogsleds was centered in the strip. The dogsleds run from selvedge to selvedge across the width of the fabric. HOWEVER, the vertical distance between one motif and the next was approximately 4” or so. There was no way to cut a strip in such a way that it wasn’t chopping off part of the motif above or below it (or both). The kit included extra fabric to account for this issue. The most obvious solution would have been to cut a 5-1/2” strip out of every other motif. I needed eight 5-1/2” strips.

There were 14 dogsled motifs on the piece of fabric included in the kit.

Sigh.

To complicate matters even further, the dogsled motif doesn’t run in a straight line across the width of the fabric. No, that would be too easy. The motif weaves back and forth a bit, which makes placing it in the center of the strip even trickier.

I managed to get eight strips cut from the fabric I had. I even managed to get the motifs mostly centered. Each border, though, had to be pieced from two of the strips placed end to end. I drove myself batty for half an hour trying to butt the edges of the strips together in such a way that there wasn’t a jarring disconnect between the motifs over the seams.

That border is done. I had a splitting headache when I was done, but now I can move on to the next border. I related all of this to the husband at dinner and I said that were I not such a perfectionist, this would have taken the one hour of time I had allotted originally.

I’m not sorry I agreed to do this—I have learned several new skills and also confirmed that I don’t like either batiks or fussy cutting—but I am ready for this quilt top to be done. It is also getting to the size where I have to wrangle it through the machine to attach each border.

I need to make something small next.

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Seed orders have been placed and should be arriving soon. I asked the husband to get me a pallet of bags of seed starting soil the next time he is at the hardware or farm store. We won’t be starting seeds for another month yet, but I’ll need to get out to the greenhouse and organize some things. Our local weatherman noted last night that Spokane and the Idaho panhandle are supposed to get hammered with a huge winter storm this weekend. Some of that—we won’t know how much until it happens—may bleed over into Kalispell. This has been an extraordinarily mild winter so far. We’re due for a few feet of snow.