Blast from the Past: A Dedication

Once upon a time when I quilted, I learned the art of the handmade dedication. My friend, my niece, My SIL, and my Son all got handstitched dedications on the back of their quilts. It was time consuming, but I really felt it added a nice, personal touch to the gift.

It's been literally years since I did a hand-stitched dedication (the last one I did for my son took me months), but this spring, we found out our pastor of 8 years was leaving for a different church. And I had a choice: I could let it go without comment, or I could put my skills to use on a handmade gift.

You can guess which way I went :-) Someone else had already put in the work to order a beautiful stole off Etsy, but it was bought and paid for by a small subset of our church - those of us who are LGBT friendly, and supportive of the progressive mission of the church our pastor is going to. I wanted her to remember and (others to see!) that this wasn't just a parting gift: she had our backing for her new mission.

I got seriously cross-eyed trying to sew this in less than two weeks - the same two weeks, I might add, where our fridge died and our kids switched daycares and everything as that could go wrong DID go wrong, but it was worth it.

It's easy to get lost in the day to day, sometimes, but the gift of a handstitched dedication has some staying power. I'll miss our old pastor, but I'm glad I got to hand stitch some love for her before she went.

Process Post: All in the Ohana

Since my process for All In the Ohana was pretty detailed, I have split it into two posts. One for those who just want to see the end product and coo over the selected fabrics, and another that documents the process for any non-quilters who are curious about my method for joining scraps to look continuous.

As a quilter, I learned a pretty neat trick for making non-continuous fabric look continuous. If you're curious about my process, here goes:

1) Start with two scraps that capture different areas of repeat of the fabric, but have some overlap. within the overlap, decide on your "Line of Relative Disinterest:" a line across the fabric that doesn't have much going for it (no faces, or designs that you don't want distorted). This is where your seam joining the two pieces will go. In this case, I picked a line across the sand and as much non-foamy water as I could get, so the seam would naturally be less noticeable.

2) Lay what will be your bottom piece out flat, and fold the top piece to the line of relative disinterest identified in (1). Then lay your FOLDED top piece with the fold along the same line on the bottom piece, so that the two look continuous when placed together.

3) Slide a quilting ruler (or some other straight edge) to the bottom of the fold in the top piece. It should line up with your Line of Disinterest. (see above)
4) Then holding both top and bottom piece carefully in place, open the fold and mark the fold line. This lets you put a "seam guide" at the place where the two fabrics match up.

4) Pin! Pin, pin, pin, pin, pin. Pin like it is going out of style! And, pin without moving the two fabrics relative to each other, because this is where you'e ensuring that your top piece is going to fold back out to look continuous with your bottom piece.

5) Sew along your sew guide line, again being careful not to shift your fabric. (I didn't think to take a pic, but if you can sew, you can imagine this)

6) Open the fabric back out, and admire (or critique!) how close you got to matching the repeats perfectly. When convenient, trim the excess on the side you are not using.

Here's my end result, which allowed me to fussycut the way I wanted to AND squeeze a second dress out of a yard of directional fabric with an 11 inch repeat! Not a bad deal, especially considering it was impossible to buy more fabric.

All in the Ohana

It's been over 2 years since R received her "More Mingoes" dress, but her mom still sends me photos of her in it. It's well loved! R's mom - an occasional reader of this blog, and faithful humor-er when I need to talk about fabric - also reports that R *loved* having a matching dress for her baby sister, but that since baby sis is almost a year old, that six-month sized dress isn't fitting any more. R hasn't received a new dress since I switched to knits. That's one oversight I'd like to remedy!

Fortunately, this little beauty - ordered in January - arrived exactly 5 days before I was scheduled to get on a plane to see R and her family. The schedule was tight, but I was determined to rise to the occasion.

I had lucked out because as it turned out, I already had two Peekaboo Violet patterns traced out in the right sizes from another project I'd abandoned (or more accurately, scaled down to better fit my nieces). I was able to drag those out, and get right to work on cutting. Which... immediately became a challenge, because I had *just enough* fabric to get 3 of the 4 panels I needed cut in continuous fabric. You can read my process post to see how I pulled the 4th together.

It was still a crazy weekend - I think the fabric arrived on Wednesday, I prewashed it Thursday, and I had both dresses done by Sunday; but I was very glad I'd gotten them done. Here they are being showcased before I packed them up:

and here they are on the happy recipients!

I was able to deliver them in person, but it was late when I arrived so the girls did not wear them until later that week. Nonetheless, R's mother tells me that R let every teacher at daycare know that these dresses were made for her and her sister by me personally. How's that for a commendation? Here's hoping these dresses are just as loved as the previous set. So far, all signs point to "yes"!