Shoreline Quilt Backstory

   Sometimes I wonder if I would finish any quilts if it weren’t for the Puyallup Fair (Washington State Fair). For some reason, the fair’s deadline for entering quilts seems to be the one that I take seriously. One year I stitched the final stitches of one of my quilts while being driven to drop it off at the fair.

    This time I thought I had allowed plenty of time. I started “Shoreline” three years ago, after seeing quilt/fabric designer Tula Pink at the Sewing & Stitchery Expo’s Quilter’s Night Out.

She has a playful personality and is on the cutting edge of the Modern Quilt movement. I love her fresh, fanciful fabrics! That night I got to meet her. She autographed one of her books and a scrap of her fabric for me.

    I spent the next few months collecting her fabrics, and even enlisted my son to pick up a few yards at a Pacific Fabrics store near Seattle.

My favorite Tula Pink fabric.

I found the free pattern for Shoreline online at TulaPink.com.

     Summer rolled around which meant it was time for my husband John’s annual faculty meeting at WSU. I tagged along in August 2014. I packed up my sewing machine, a rotary cutter and mat, and yards and yards of Tula Pink fabric and rode across the state to a newly opened, air conditioned room in the Residence Inn by Marriott.

     While John was in meetings, I set up my sewing area and started rotary cutting strips and then stacking them by color. Rows of strips outlined the room.

     John came back that afternoon, and asked me to look at his elbow. It was hurting and swollen. It looked like there was a golf ball in it! Did he get stung by a bee? I gave him an antihistamine and he went back to his meeting.

     My sewing machine was blazing through strips of Tula Pink fabric. Long loops of colorful fabrics combined with midnight blue strips started coming together. I would cut the loops randomly later and then piece them to each other. The assembly of this quilt was super easy. I was on fire! I had tons of fabric, why not grow this quilt from throw size to queen size?

     John came back to the room before he met his colleagues for dinner. His elbow looked even worse. We put ice on it. I thought we should go to the emergency room. He thought he should go to the dinner. I ate the 6” sub he’d brought me from Subway and then continued the sew-a-thon. I managed to get most of the quilt top pieced!

     A couple of hours later, John returned again. His right elbow was huge, red, and angry looking. I ordered him into the car and we headed to the emergency room.

The doctor said he thought John had either broken a bursa sac in his elbow or had an infection---MRSA? He drained fluid from it and sent it to a lab to be tested. We couldn’t understand how he broke a bursa sac since he hadn’t hit his elbow. They bandaged up his elbow and put his arm in a sling. The doctor gave us a prescription for antibiotics to be filled first thing in the morning at the local drug store. In the meantime, ice and elevation was the treatment.

    As soon as the drug store opened, we picked up the medication. John went into his meeting to tell them he had to leave early. In the room full of entomology professors, the consensus was that he got stung by an insect. I packed up my makeshift sewing room, loaded the car up, and drove west for 5-1/2 hours with John’s gigantic elbow propped up on an ice pack.

     The next week was spent in various doctors' offices: a general practitioner, an orthopedist, an allergist. They drained his elbow a few more times. The lab reports came back clean, no indications of an infection. In the end, we agreed that it was probably an allergic reaction to an insect bite or sting on the way to Pullman.

     And then progress on the quilt stalled. Life happened, and in the years between that Pullman trip until recently, my family faced some major health problems. I spent a lot of time visiting doctor’s offices, hospitals, hospice, and nursing homes. Quilting was the last thing on my mind. My sewing machine collected dust. Four quilt tops sat folded, waiting for me to quilt them. People asked if I’d entered a quilt in the fair. “No, not this year.” I hadn’t realized how many friends stopped to see my quilts hanging in the fair.

     A couple of weeks ago, a spark of quilt memory ignited. Wasn’t the deadline to enter quilts in the fair usually in late August? I looked it up. I was ten days out. Of the four quilt tops stacked up waiting, Shoreline would be the easiest to complete. All I had to do was make a backing, and then quilt it. That’s when the trouble began.

     Awhile back I came up with this “rule,” well more of a “guideline,” that I should use the leftover fabrics from the front of the quilt to make the backing. Don’t buy new fabric!  Use what you have! It made economic sense, obviously the fabrics would play well together, plus when the quilt was being snuggled under and you flipped it back to go and get a bowl of ice cream or popcorn, both sides would look beautiful. In my noblest intentions, the back side of the quilt should be as beautiful as the front.

     I dug out the remainder of the Tula Pink fabrics. Then I remembered that I had also bought several yards of various navy/indigo/nautical blue solid fabrics in an attempt to match the dark blue part of the quilt top in case I didn’t have enough.  After receiving my online order and comparing the five or six ½ yard cuts to what I was trying to match, I recall thinking, “this may as well be 50 shades of blue, and none of them match!” Three years later I spent half a day searching for those “50 shades of blue.” Late at night, after surviving a fabric avalanche in my sewing area, I gave up and went to bed.

     When I opened my eyes in the morning, I knew exactly where the blues were and pulled them out. Ah, sweet progress! I set about improvising, starting with the biggest pieces of fabric. I cut the smaller pieces into 8” squares and made two rows of those. Since the quilt top was all vertical columns, I made these rows horizontal.

   Taking a short break from the quilt one day, I dropped some old clothes off at a thrift store. Afterwards, I went inside to wander around. I found a paper roll of “Triangles on a Roll” to make 3-1/2” half square triangle blocks. It was $4.99. They usually run about $10, which is why I’ve never tried them. I snatched that up to use on the quilt back. It would fulfill another of my quilting rules: Try a new technique on every quilt that you make. Those triangles on a roll were excellent! Paper piecing is always precise. I used up one of “the blues” to make a row of pinwheels.

     I pieced together all the sections of the quilt back and then pin basted the back, the batting, and the top together. It was ready to be quilted!

     “Quilt as desired” is the usual ending to quilt directions. The problem was that I didn’t know what I desired. After much deliberation, and probably a lot of influence from excitement over the eclipse, I thought I’d quilt some big spiral circles scattered over the colorful area and then add straight vertical lines echoing the seam lines on the deep blue sections. The circles would be a nice contrast to all the straight lines, and it would fit with in with the modern look.

    I had seen an easy looking spiral technique on Pinterest. I found spools of variegated threads in blue, green and orange in my thread drawer. I loaded the green onto my long arm sit down machine and settled in to get started. My foot pressed down on the pedal, the motor hummed, and nothing happened. I gripped the hand wheel and tried to turn it. It was frozen. I scanned the manual and it said to not plug it directly into the wall. I rustled up a surge protector and re-plugged it in. Still just motor humming. I took the bobbin out and tried again. No luck. I crawled under the table with a flash light and shined it in the bobbin case, poking around in there. I couldn’t see anything obstructing the needle. After spending another hour trying to get my Tin Lizzie to run, I gave up.

     I thought about scheduling time at a quilt shop on a long arm machine, but you usually have to schedule that a month and a half ahead of time. It was Tuesday. I wanted to turn the quilt in on Friday. I would have to quilt it on my “regular” machine.

     I tried the Pinterest technique, drawing a small, tight circle on my quilt top and using my walking foot to circle around it. It looked horrible. I double checked the Pinterest post. She was quilting on a 20” square, not a queen sized quilt.

These are the spirals/circles I had in mind.

     I tried lowering my feed dogs and spiraling using free motion quilting. It was terrible.

     The quilting should not ruin a beautifully designed and pieced quilt top! I started brainstorming. What if I took yarn and couched it over the zig-zaggy amoeba-like spiral? If you can’t make a circle with regular sewing, why would yarn make it better? It will be hard enough to rip out without adding yarn. What if I used a zig zag stitch instead of a straight stitch? Then it would look like I made crooked lines on purpose.

This is the amoeba circle I quilted.

     There’s a popular saying among quilters: If you can’t see a mistake in a quilt while riding by on a galloping horse, then it’s OK. I get that, but if my eye goes straight to a mistake every time I look at one of my quilts, I’d rather correct it while I can. It took 3-1/2 hours, but I ripped out every stitch of the sorry looking spiral.

     How could I be struggling so hard with this? This is a very simple quilt. I’ve been quilting for 17 years and sewing for almost 50 years.  Yet, here I was: three broken needles and one broken long arm machine later. I hadn’t been this frustrated since ninth grade Home Economics when I had the great idea to make a pant suit out of red, white and blue houndstooth wool and my teacher insisted that the seams be matched to the thread.

    It was the beginning of a long hate relationship with the seam ripper. When I finished that outfit, it was perfect, but I only wore it a few times because I couldn’t stand it. Through tears of frustration, before I made this quilt situation even worse, I put the seam ripper down and stepped away from the sewing machine.

    During the ten-plus days of my quilting crunch, John grilled dinner every night while I popped up from the machine long enough to eat. On Friday night, over a barbecued burger, I told him I was ready to throw in the towel. He raised an eyebrow. I’m not usually one to concede defeat.

    A few hours and many deep breaths later, I went back to my sewing area and used a method that always worked for me. I calmly took a black Sharpie and drew a spiral onto a piece of tracing paper, then pinned it onto the quilt. This time I used an open toed foot with my feed dogs up. Although I still had to muscle that queen sized quilt through the 11” throat of my machine, the result was much better. It even looked like a spiral!

Much improved spiral!

    Then I added more different sized spirals using the technique that worked. They don’t exactly match what I pictured in my head, but they were good enough which fits my quilting motto—my quilts aren’t perfect, but they’re Good ‘Nuff.

     The rest of the quilting was a breeze—parallel lines following the seam lines on the dark blue parts of the quilts until they hit a spiral. All that was left was the binding, label, and hanging sleeve.

     It was so late in the game, I wouldn’t have time to bind this quilt my usual way—machine sew it to the front, flip the binding to the back and then hand sew it to the back. Shoreline measured 70” x 85.” It would take too long to hand sew around that 240” perimeter. I’d try another new technique that I’d also seen on Pinterest. Machine sew the binding to the back, then flip it to the front and machine sew it down. It was Saturday. I’d already missed my self-imposed deadline of Friday. This new binding technique was do or die.

     So, of course since I didn’t have enough pressure, I decided to add another technique challenge to the time challenge.  Why not make the binding color match the quilt color on the sections that weren’t midnight blue? Yeah! That’s an awesome idea! I didn’t waste time measuring where the color changes would fall. I just sewed the binding on until it was about 6” from the next color and matched it up then. That actually worked!

     Usually I stitch two sides of the label into a corner of the quilt along with the binding, and I also stitch the sleeve in with the binding along the top of the quilt. Sometimes I use permanent colored Pigma pens to draw the label, but since I was just a bit pressed for time, this time I wrote the label on our computer and printed it on the printer.

     To print the label on fabric, I soak muslin in a special solution that makes the ink on an inkjet printer permanent. After it’s dried, I iron freezer paper to it and then cut it the same size as a standard piece of paper, 8-1/2 x 11.” The fingers crossed part is feeding it through the printer without it jamming. That only happened once this time, so I didn’t have to hold my breath for too long.

     While I was working on the label, I remembered that scrap of fabric that Tula autographed for me three years before. That should be on the label. Where was that 2 x 3” scrap? I was positive that I put it someplace “special” so that I wouldn’t lose it, but where in this overflowing sewing room that now looked like a hurricane had blown through? After rummaging through quilt debris, I spotted it tacked to my bulletin board!

     The last call for quilts at the fair was Sunday, August 20 from 12 to 6:00 pm.  I rolled through the fair gates at 3:00. Three hours to spare! Upstairs in the Pavilion, the ladies spread that quilt on a table to measure it and I watched the edges of it ripple—too many seams, no stabilizing border. Add that to the mediocre quilting and the only ribbon I would be getting would be a participation ribbon. But, that would be ribbon enough. I was participating again, quilting again after too much time off. And despite the setbacks, this quilt, Shoreline, is a winner in my eyes!

Shoreline quilt completed!

Shoreline quilt back.

Update: It’s September 1, 2017, the first day of the fair. John and I got there bright and early. Our eyes looked upward in the Pavilion searching for Shoreline. It was hanging near the door. I was astonished to see a yellow Honorable Mention ribbon pinned to it! Sticking with it through all the challenges paid off!

Laura Keolanui Stark is trying to fix her longarm quilting machine using online advice before taking it to the shop to be repaired. She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.