The Tale of the Ornery Binding

So, let's start with the good stuff: a beauty shot of the finished queen sized quilt! It's Chevron and on from Quilty Magazine, one of my favs!

It came back from Quilts Everlasting, all swirly, lovely, trimmed, and ready to bind! Home stretch, I say! Woo hoo! I was about 2/3 done attaching the binding, using Mary Fons' three part binding tutorial, and DRAMA! I was almost out of blue thread! Quelle horreur! Could I possibly finish before the thread totally ran out?

And then..kaput. The boys were at Sunday school, and I had just 2 hours to finish before the kids came home expecting to snuggle test this new quilt - I must not disappoint.  Off to dig in the closet...

And I found this broken bobbin, but it had the advantage of storing a wee bit of that thread.

I rewound broken bobbin to non-broken bobbin, crossing my fingers that I could sew from a bobbin in place of a spool of thread.

And, phew! It worked...until...I got to the very end, I'm talking about 10 inches left to zig zag stitch. 10 piddly inches! The bobbin underneath ran out of thread! Bobbin up top, subbing in for regular spool, totally fine, underneath, empty! I'm proud to say, I didn't curse...much.

I was feeling mighty punchy by this point, so I pulled out the brightest bobbin in the bunch.  I feel like every quilt has a story to tell, and this quilt's is "The Tale of the Ornery Binding". If you flip over this quilt, and look at the binding, there's a few zigzags stitches in bright red. 

When I was teaching knitting and sewing classes over at Laura's Sewing School, I would always mention an ancient Persian tradition to my students when they got a tad frustrated.  The ancient Persians believed that only God was perfect, so when they knotted those beautiful, intricate, wool rugs they would always make one intentional mistake.  So, even though my mistake wasn't premeditated, I'm sure the Ancients Persians would approve!
But, on the bright side, this quilt passed the snuggle test with flying colors, and has happily taken up residence on our bed.  

Last post, I was struggling with the photos for this blog.  I have since discovered Aviary through Flickr, and it's a great photo editor.  I don't have a lot of experience with photo editors, but this program took my somewhat blah point and click photos and allowed me to sharpen, add color saturation and all other kinds of enhancements. In fact, this quilt was a nine-patch before I started editing the photos! (just kidding)

I've been slowly digesting Rachel at Stitched in Color's fantastic blog.  She made the journey from new sewist to blogging/designing/teaching professional in a few years and it has been very interesting reading about her growth as an artist and sewist, and her family. At any rate, she has a great quick and dirty photo tutorial (scroll down, there are two posts midway) which helped me get my house in order photo-wise. I only wish I could have taken some outdoor shots with this quilt, but it started sleeting today in New England, so the outdoors will have to wait! Brrr!