doily-go-round

Projects come and go here, the urge to work on them goes away and comes back again. Remember the doily quilt? The top was finished last September and the back is also pieced. So that's about eight months that I have been thinking about the sashing for.

I feel that the edges of the embroidered nine-patch blocks need some delineation. I thought about appliquéing some ribbon along the seams but it was too heavy. Then I thought about some embroidery but that really seemed too labour intensive (although goodness knows how much I could have achieved in eight months). Finally I got inspired by a project in my favourite quilt book - Make Your Own Contemporary Quilts - which uses machine embroidery with perle 8 cotton in the bobbin. This of course requires that you sew on the wrong side of the fabric. So I decided to try this technique out. I chose the shade of perle 8 and that was as far as I got.

Until yesterday, when I finally got to work with an empty bobbin which I wound by hand with some practice perle 8. And then I tested it out:

















What I learnt from these tests:

• you have to make sure that the bobbin thread is properly caught otherwise it comes through all loose and gets tangled up and costs you a good quarter of an hour digging it out of the bobbin case (far left);
• loose tension with a straight stitch works well (centre) although the sewing thread does still peek through a bit;
• zig-zag stitch doesn't work (no matter what the tension).

I'm happy with the straight stitch and am planning to give it a try, perhaps even two parallel lines of stitching. First, I'll have to get a coordinating green sewing thread. Oh dear, it could be months ...