Round the Corner

I got the other long border and one short border of the Kindness quilt done yesterday, which forced me to deal with the issue of the corners. I researched some ideas and decided that making progressively smaller ribbon candies to turn the corner would be the best solution. That required, though, that I ditch the security of the rulers and freehand the ribbons. I roughed them in with a disappearing marker, which helped.

They are not perfect, but I am not unhappy with how they turned out:

A little bit of the marker is still visible, which should disappear soon.

I have one short border and the other two corners left to do. I would have continued working on the quilt and finished those, but the husband came home from work early and distracted me by being a shiny toy. I gave up quilting in favor of sitting and having drinks on the (inside) veranda with him.

I know, too, how I want to quilt that narrow red border. A few more hours at the machine and this one will be ready for binding. Then it’s on to the next one.

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I am excited about teaching my serger class today. I have my machine all threaded and ready to go.

The threading paths for the loopers and needles are color coded inside the machine, so I threaded each path with its corresponding color of thread. That makes it easy, on white fabric, to demonstrate a balanced stitch as well as to illustrate what happens when tension is out of whack. I’ve also got a pile of sample items with different kinds of stitches. I think it’s important to show practical applications for things like rolled hems and lettuce edges.

With eight students—and potentially, eight different machines—getting everyone up and running might be a challenge, but it’s a good challenge. I am so glad that beginning serging is its own class now and a prerequisite to other classes.

The quilt store north of town asked about me teaching serger classes there, but that hasn’t gone any further. Out of respect, because she asked me first, I did run the idea past the owner of the store where I am teaching today to see if she had any objections. She did not. The two stores seem to get along now, although I understand that wasn’t the case with a previous owner.

I’m not interested in drama. I just want to teach people how to use their sergers.

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I took advantage of a big sale at Accuquilt and purchased the English Paper Piecing Qube from the overstock bin at the end of December. It came via the FedEx truck yesterday. I’m doing enough EPP now that it will be useful to have those dies. Strangely, the order for the strip dies that I placed earlier in December—they were also on sale—shows that it is still “processing.” One of the items in that order was out of stock, so it may be that they are waiting for it to arrive before they ship the whole order. I think these new dies will round out my die collection for the moment. I tend not to buy the dies for individual blocks because I like to make my units oversized and trim them down. Most of my dies are for the geometric shapes, like squares and triangles. And strips, of course, because those are so handy.