Working out the kinks.

These last two weeks seem to be offering opportunities to work out the kinks.  If you have been to the shop during our daytime hours, you will know that there are two littles that come with me.  That means that some days are better than others.  Thankfully our customers are wonderful and seem to enjoy interacting with the littles while I make adjustments to the machines or quilt.  This is also why I normally book one at time during the daytime hours.  I gave it a shot for two renters during the day with the littles and we did make it through.  A minor victory for me. 

It also seems like Mother Nature has been working the kinks out in the weather...I think that she has gotten the kinks of summer all worked out now.  Hopefully this 90+ degree heat will soon give way to fall.

Speaking of working out the kinks, are you in the habit of doing a practice block?  If not, it may be to your benefit to grab some scraps and try out the block before you dig in to the fabrics specially bought for your project.  I know that may seem counter intuitive at times. After all, we know what we are doing right?  We've done this before haven't we?  Sometimes though, even those things that we think are simple may not work out as we had thought they originally might.

We just finished up a lovely quilt for a customer - and by that I mean that we did the piecing and assembling of the quilt top.  The name of that quilt is Snake River and you can find it in Judy Martin's Log Cabin Book. (If you haven't seen this book, you should - there are a lot of great layout ideas as well as patterns)  I mean, it's a log cabin block.  Why on earth would we need to do a practice for such a simple block.  Well, I'll tell you.  Sometimes what they put in the book isn't everything that you need to know about making that block.  In the example of Snake River we quickly discovered that we would need to trim the block after adding each of the sides to make sure it would stay true to the finished size.  Then as we were assembling the border we discovered there was an error in the cutting directions (fortunately making the piece longer rather than shorter) and we went online to find the correction.

Please don't think that I'm picking on Judy Martin.  She designs some spectacular stuff and I still plan on using her patterns and just because I am mentioning "difficulties" here it is not the fault of Judy or her designs.  Truthfully this type of thing can happen with any quilt pattern you are making.  Thus the practice block.  It made a lot of sense for us to make one first so we could be sure that we had our own heads on straight as we started the project where we could watch how pressing went and some cutting and finally how all the pieces really fit together.

If you are about to embark on a new project it might be of interest to you to make a practice block to work out the kinks.