I did it! I successfully completed my scalloped baby blanket for my flickr group Simul-Sew last weekend, thanks to my new favorite thing: my walking foot! I had to order it from the Singer website, but thankfully it only took a few days to arrive.
One of the hardest parts about this project was cutting the large pieces of fabric. For one thing, my cutting area is not large enough. For another thing, I soon realized that my fabric was warped - not soon enough though, because I'd already cut it into a trapezoid, instead of a rectangle. I pulled on it diagonally to straighten it out, dampened and repressed it. Then I had to unravel the threads
from one of the edges so I could see the grain, recut that edge so I'd
have one correctly cut side to measure from, did the same on the
opposite side, folded the fabric so those edges met, and then trimmed
off the two sides. I ended up with a rectangle that's somewhat smaller than planned, but oh well.
I thought it would take forever to sew the scallops, but it went really quickly, even though I stopped every few inches to reposition the blanket so its weight wouldn't fight me as I went around the curves. As per the advice on the Bend-the-Rules Sewing flickr group, I used a TON of safety pins to keep my layers from shifting:
What did take forever was trimming the extra fabric around the stitches. Unfortunately, all that scissor work soon reawakened my old repetitive stress injury. (A word of advice about repetitive stress injuries: Don't get one. They never really go away.) But I persevered, with many breaks and much hand-stretching. A lot of people on the flickr group said that the points of their scallops didn't turn out well, and the response was that you need to trim really close in the points. So I trimmed as close as I could (note also the notches for the curves):
Even so, once I turned the blanket, there were puckers and tucks around a lot of the points. I tried to go back in and trim some of them even closer, but it didn't seem to make any difference - not only that, one of them started to fray, and I had to go back in and reinforce it with hand stitching. Luckily, most of the worst puckering got much better when I pressed it. But unluckily, the two worst puckers were at the ends of my quilting lines, so when I quilted down towards them, they got even worse:
Wish I'd thought of that and quilted between a different scallop.
The other tricky part of this project is handsewing to close the two scallops that you have to leave open for turning. Someone suggested leaving a slit in the quilt back instead, but I wasn't crazy about the idea of having a huge scar in the back of my blanket, and my Simul-Sew buddy said that she did it that way and wished she hadn't. So I turned once again to Wendi Gratz's handsewing tutorial, using my fingers to press the edges together as I went around the curve. I kind of eyeballed it, cutting notches whenever the fabric started to bunch and then sewing through both edge of the V with my next stitch. The handsewing is ok, it just looks like I have two really wonky scallops - I probably should have drawn the curve onto the fabric so I'd have a guide, instead of just winging it:
The actual quilting went much better than I expected, no doubt because of my beautiful walking foot, which I'm never taking off again. A lot of people on the flickr group who didn't use one were disappointed with the amount of puckering along their quilting lines, but mine are pretty flat, as you can see (I did also put all those safety pins back in before I quilted - at least every 3 inches, if not closer). Here's the finished product:
Not too bad, all things considered! I don't know as I'd make this project again because of the trouble with the scallops - the wrist pain as well as the puckering frustration. But it did allow me to practice sewing curves, and also get my feet wet with quilting without the intimidating piecing aspect. I really enjoyed it, now I want to make more quilts! In fact, I quilted a potholder that same day, which I will post shortly.
