A Change of Plans & Prewashing Shot Cottons

Now that he has set out on his own, our son Sam has been developing his own ideas about decorating and he has decidedly modern tastes.  Sam's Woolly Flannel quilt, which I was "working on" (read "half done and put off too many times") is no longer in tune with what he likes most.  People and circumstances are ever changing.  

So, in order to aid Sam in choosing what he wanted for his quilt... I got him to go on Pinterest.  (Cue woman laughing maniacally in the background.)   He chose a picture that someone had mistaken for a quilt.  It is a painting by Emma Biggs and Matthew Collings.   He asked if I could make a quilt like that.  Since I had made a diamond quilt once before, for our daughter Kaitie: Definitely not DeKaffe, I said "Sure!"  How hard could it be?  (Cocky-over-confidence-jumps-up-and-bites-me-in-the-fanny-hard, that's how hard.) 

The first thing I did, was to make a mock up using EQ7 and then I "painted" it in shot cotton fabrics from both the Oakshott and Peppered Cottons lines.  

This is the EQ7 Mock Up - not a real quilt yet!

I'm hoping it will look pretty close to this when all is said and done.  Each diamond block measures 5" by 20" when finished.

This week started of with a massive fabric pre-washing day.  Are you a pre-washer?  I mostly am now.  Shot cottons shrink and wrinkle quite a lot more than regular quilting cottons, so I am very glad I did not skip this step.  

Maryse (Maryse Makes Things) and I have been having a very interesting discussion about shot cottons.  We both were curious to see how they would turn out after washing.  I found that the Oakshott wrinkles much more than the Peppered cottons, but that both can be pressed back to looking great.  It helps a lot if you do not let it dry all the way in the dryer, then iron it while still slightly damp.  Even that did not remove all the wrinkles though.  It took some Mary Ellen's Best Press to do that.  To give you an idea, here is a photo of some Oakshott, in the process of being ironed:

Shot Cottons are very wrinkly after washing!

To me, all this work is totally worth it, because I love the look of these fabrics!  It is my hope that the worst of the wrinkling will have been gotten out of the fabric's system and that it won't be as bad when the whole quilt gets washed.  Do you think it would help if the quilting is closer spaced?

(Edit: I just read on the Oakshott Cottons website that they do not recommend that you put their fabric in the dryer.  I just assumed it was like the Peppered cotton, and she does say to prewash and partially dry the fabric.  So I wanted any new readers to know this and I will also mention this in my next post.  However, I am glad that I did it anyway - most quilts will eventually get tossed into a dryer.)

All the fabric is washed and ready to use!

Penny wants me to play with her - she was running back and forth tossing that toy the whole time I was draping fabric over the railing!

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So, it turns out that sewing a half rectangle triangle (HRT) is nowhere near the same as sewing a half square triangle (HST).  I don't know what I was thinking, but at first I ended up with this.  (It was midnight, what can I say?)

Keep this up and I can make the NBC Peacock jealous!

Even when I got it right, it wasn't right.  The points will not hit the seam allowances at the right places.  I don't know why I didn't have this trouble with the Kaffe Quilt.    

I found a tremendously helpful HRT tutorial over at Jamie's busy bee quilts.  (Hello fellow bee!) She addresses the very issues that were puzzling me.  It still took some trial and error, but with her insights, I was able to change up things to the sizes I needed.  Getting the angles and measurements right was difficult.  I switched to using ugly fabric with old sheets for test trials.

  
Yet, even after finding the right measurements, I could not get consistent results.  Those HRTs are going to finish at 2.5" by 10" and that long skinny shape means errors are easy to make.  So guess what I did.  I paper pieced them!  (Yup, there's a surprise.)  Ahh... lots better!

Paper Pieced Diamond Blocks

These could still stand some improvement.  I need to be more careful with matching the center seams in the diamonds.  (I ironed seams open, perhaps if I iron them to alternating sides...)  And when I sew the diamond blocks together, a scant 1/4 inch seam would help with that problem you can see in the center of the photo, where the side points are vying for space.  

But anyway - it is nice to be on my way to getting this quilt made for Sam.  Maybe this one will be finished before he marries a woman with completely different tastes, LOL.  

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One last sweet thing!  My cousin sent me a wonderful photo of her little girl with her Goldfish Bowl Pocketbook.  She said her little girl was thrilled with her fishy big sister gifts! :)  :)  :)  So I thought I'd share the picture here, because she is just too adorable for words!

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