Rachel "Ivy" Clarke

After a couple of false starts, I finally sandwiched my quilt top, batting, and backing.

The first issue was finding a place to work on the whole project. I have plenty of floor space in my new studio, but it's not necessarily a place I want to work, especially when I'm working on a predominently white quilt.

Yes, that's my dirty foot. That's what my feet look like on a regular basis after walking around my studio. There's no way I want to put a quilt on a floor like that. People have suggested that I could mop, but who wants to mop 1300 sq. ft. of painted concrete floor, especially when it's that dirty? I envision it turning into puddles of muddy sludge everywhere and not really solving the problem. Anyone who thinks mopping is a good idea is more than welcome to come over and do it themselves. In the meantime, I bought some old sheets at the thrift store and just used them as dropcloths.

After a trip to JoAnn's to procure some spray baste (a first-time experiment for me), I laid out the back on the dropcloths and srayed it. Then I went to lay the batting on top, when I discovered that the batting I had was too narrow. Aargh! The JoAnn's was already closed, putting the project on hold.

So in the meantime, I made a new cover for my ironing board. I had some brown cotton with little dressmaking tools printed on it that I was never going to use for clothing or piecing, and I needed something on which to practice my freemotion quilting and this seemed like as good a project as any, expecially since my old ironing board cover was looking pretty sad:

Next time, I'll just pay the $7 at JoAnn's for a new cover, as this turned out to be a PITA and take up far more time than I'd really wanted to spend on it.

Close-up of quilting:

My quilting is not as good as I would like; I haven't done stippling in several years, plus I was getting used to a new darning foot on a different machine, as well as working directly with the batting as opposed to a fabric bottom. The tension on the underside is pretty bad. It's not a big deal here, since the back isn't exposed, but I'll probably have to practice again and figure out the problem before taking on the mod sampler.

Finally the next day, I was able to get back to the (now-picked-over) JoAnn's and get some batting. The selection wasn't very good (I don't know why I'm even surprised) but I found an 80/20 cotton/poly blend that I'd never worked with before but it seemed nice. I also happened to acquire some tables from my parents, so I was able to work on those instead of the dirty floor. They're not quite big enough, so i had to sandwich in shifts, which was way more challenging than it seems like it should be, but hey, it's sandwiched now and that's what matters.