Quiltingboard Forums - One Mistake Leads to Another

Before Christmas, I picked up some fabric with penguins on it, planning to make something for my DH, who loves penguins. But one mistake led to another…

1. Pick an appropriate quilt block for the material. Instead of making a quilt with large blocks of this lovely fabric, I decided I wanted to do an attic window. Since the fabric wouldn’t be suitable for inside the window, it was now delegated to the border.

2. Know your materials. Since I couldn’t find a large panel with penguins, I decided to use printable fabric. Yes, I read it was a bit stiff… but how stiff could it be? It was fabric – right? A BIT STIFF? Think cardboard. Still I muddled on. When I got to free motion quilting, my machine would skip stitches since the needle would pull the whole panel up. The only way to quilt it was to use my walking foot (which would hold down the panel okay) and stop every few stitches and shift the quilt around. Boy, was this ever SLOW!

3. Keep blocks a known size. Although in Photoshop, it appeared that the individual windows were the same size (9 X 7), when printed, they were actually an odd size. No problem, I thought. I’ll just sew and cut the pieces of the window, sashing and frame to fit. Although I’ve read multiple times, that you must know the size of your blocks and sash and cut your borders to the correct size. If you just sew them on, you’ll have extra fabric in your border. It’s a lap quilt, so how bad could it be? Bad enough to cause little tucks during the quilting.

So here is my DH with his cardboard-like windows and ticks in the border. Still he loves it because I made it for him. He is such a sweetie. Do you think after soaking it in the bathtub it would get softer? My DH won’t let me do that for fear of losing the printed image.