I haven't decided yet what to call my memorial quilt, but I have made significant progress in the last few days. To keep track, I'm bundling the little postage stamp bits into packages of 25.
As of yesterday: 575 and change, on the way to 2,662.
For the back layer, I'm using a strange polypropylene fabric that people buy to tack on the bottom of upholstered furniture, among other uses. It doesn't fray or ravel, so the only stray threads along the edges of my little bits will be those from the top fabric. It's only $3 a yard, and comes in a lot of colors, but I'm using black, this being a memorial and all. The only drawback to this fabric is that it melts into a horrible mess if you so much as touch your iron to it. Ask me how I know.
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| after barely touching the iron |
I'm cutting my fabrics into five-inch widths and putting in enough rows of stitching to hold the layers together before I slice them into 1 1/4-inch strips.
Then I put in enough additional stitching to quilt the whole thing together, leaving one channel for my eventual line of stitching to hold the bits together horizontally.
Finally, I slice the strips into 1 1/2-inch bits. I confess that after I did this meticulous planning and made a few hundred bits, I decided they would look better a touch wider. So now I'm cutting them almost 1 3/4 inches wide. I don't think the disparity is going to be a problem if the 300 smaller ones are subsumed into an expanse of 2,300 larger ones. Probably even I won't notice the difference!
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