We had a nice visit yesterday, she said she wasn't ready to sew together but we covered a lot of ground. I think we could have made her blocks at the same time but we each work different ways. It's hard for me to remember that strip/chain piecing multiple units is a new concept when you are used to making a jacket for instance. But yes, a lot of it was as the new quilter she was stressing with all us old quilters. I explained that I'm not really any better skill-wise than she is except that I've made most of the mistakes possible by now and learned from some of that. Some of the stuff I constantly have to relearn and mistakes I still make so my real skill is in mistake fixing!
I spent many years being very precise in both my cutting and piecing, but I started before the rotary revolution. As time has gone on, my stash larger, and my vision poorer, I now do most of my work by starting large and trimming down. Even with extra steps, for me it's faster and I get better results than accuracy alone. It's a different concept and technique. In many ways it is similar to paper piecing just with no paper, but I'm still bad at that myself!
So first we went over those V blocks. I grabbed some bright advertisements out of the recycle and we cut some rectangles and triangles and played with how cutting mattered for mirror images. We tried both correct measurements and the oversized -- she felt oversized worked better for her than either the paper piecing or traditional. Also how weird it would look with the mirror sides deliberately cut big to trim down, but if we were careful with cutting the triangle, we knew the base was flat and what the final dimensions would be. I grabbed a piece of the gridded template plastic and drew the shape. Also the explanation that it was not a ruler and how to line up the ruler to the template for trimming.
Then it was the basic construction of the Goose unit made with a rectangle and two squares. I thought I had given her good links, but sometimes you just get so much more in person. And then when I explained that while I pin (and showed what I mean, my pins are down much lower than people expect, maybe not so much seamstresses), other people will just layout the subunits next to the sewing machine and just go down the block. That was it for her, those light bulb moments!
And... I'm almost ashamed to admit it... but I was showing her some of my tops and she just loved my cat top. Which I've also made for my mother-in-law, and I had a full set of cat fabrics cut out and collected that I meant to make maybe as a fund raiser for the Humane Society or something -- but is now in the hands of a fresh new quilter and it is perfect starting project (minus my border). One less thing in stash... mwahaha...
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