Quilted Curtains, part 2… or take 2

As I said last time, reader, mistakes were made. A lot of them. You can see many of them. This is… not good.

A piece of green quilted canvas, on a grey laminate table. There are multiple puckers in the quilting lines, and they're all kind of wonky. Several of the lines have had to stop short of the edge, but it's clear even looking at it that there's too much extra fabric left and it will end up puckering and tucking again when the lines are finished. It's just not very good. — It’s just not very good. Too much excess fabric at the top meant it kept tucking, and the lines were just all over the place.

So what did I do? Well, firstly I sat down and unpicked all of the original stitching. That meant I no longer had any matching thread, but oh well. White stitching on sage green doesn’t look that weird or bad, I think.

And then, changes.

Firstly, I cut the piping off the edges of the piece of quilt, and squared up the corners. Then, I deconstructed the whole thing. This took quite a while, but the wadding is in good shape. I’ll back the other side with some calico.

A roll of off-white quilt wadding, with the old quilting lines still visible, on a dark blue couch cover. This photo was taken with a flash so it's lit a bit weirdly. — And it turns out that yeah that’s literally just wool wadding in there. I didn’t even need to buy any.

Then I set the quilt piece aside, to do something very simple on the canvas – mark my stitching lines. I did this knowing full well that I probably wouldn’t be able to wash any of this out. I’ve learned from experience that even good-quality tailor’s chalk can become embedded in a stitching line, and also that graphite pencil is frequently more accurate and less likely to smear, although it does only work on lighter-coloured fabrics. (I normally use my Palomino Blackwing pencil for this, as it’s a bit softer – I think it’s considered partway between a HB and a B? You’d probably get a better line from a B or even 2B pencil.) I marked in my lines at 4cm apart, and then marked in a 2cm top hem, a 4cm lower hem, and 1.5cm side hems on both sides. The wadding will need to extend into the hems, to ensure there’s no gaps in coverage.

The sage green fabric from earlier, but it's no longer quilted. It's on the grey laminate table, with a long steel ruler laying on top of it. Some lines have already been ruled on it in pencil; they're parallel and evenly spaced. — It’s easier to follow a stitching line when it’s on the fabric.

Next, I used lightly diluted washable school glue to glue-baste the quilt piece onto the canvas, on the reverse side from where I’d marked my stitching lines. (I did have proper basting glue, but not nearly enough, and that stuff is kind of pricey. And I already had a 1L bottle of the school glue.) As I said before, I probably can’t wash this out – I’m not sure how well this assemblage will wash now, but I’ll try to wash it out by hand in the bathtub. If it doesn’t wash out, hopefully it loses its stiffness over time. Glue-basting like this is good for multiple layers, extreme precision (where pins may distort the stitching line) or fabrics you can’t pin, but a downside is that you usually need to pin or weight down the fabric while the glue dries. Which can also take a while.

The green fabric, with the off-white quilt wadding on top of it and partly folded back, on the grey laminate table. Next to the fabric and wadding assemblage, there's a flat speckled grey dish, that's clearly a broken piece of a larger dish; there's a black foam paintbrush lying across it. Next to it is a large bottle of Elmer's washable school glue. — Yes, that broken dish is my glue palette. What? I’m not going to use a good dish for glue.

Let’s hope that the second take isn’t as bad as the first. There’s some nice hot weather coming up, apparently, so the assemblage should dry alright given some patience, even if that does mean I’ll be a lot slower to get to sewing it…

Share this:

Like this: