One of Those Days...

Did you ever have one of those days that just sucks?  Here's mine.

That there is a pair of Parsley Pants that I had mostly sewed over the weekend, and I just needed to sew in the elastic waistband.  So I sat down to my machine, very carefully measured and pressed, then sewed the elastic in the front instead of the back.  Yep, that happened.

After that, I decided to just sew up a Bimaa, because it's a pretty easy and quick pattern.  So I got out my fabric and pattern, and cut two fronts instead of a front and back.  Arg!  And what's worse, is that I didn't realize it until I'd already sewed everything together and was trying to attach the neckline.  And I sewed all those seams with extra reinforcing, because I did it on my straight stitch machine.  And I don't have enough fabric to cut a new back even if I could rip out all those stitches.

But you know what?  Tomorrow, when I get back to it, I'm just going to rip out some stitches and re-position that elastic.  And I'm going to try that Bimaa on my little girl, because I bet it can be salvaged.  I might even write up my "super new fancy way to customize your Bimaa" like I meant to do that all along.  ;)

Hexie Quilt, and How to Void a Warranty

So, a friend and I have been discussing going in on some larger quilting equipment together (Hi Jess!).  We're really good at sharing, and often sew together anyway.  And one night she returns from Joann's with a Sizzix BigKick!  And an Accuquilt die!  Because those things seem to be interchangeable from what we've heard around the internet.  (Also, no one carries the Sizzix quilting dies, just the paper-crafting dies.  Why?!?)

This is clearly NOT supposed to be happening!

Turns out, not so much.  Maybe if we had the largest Sizzix machine we'd be able to use the Accuquilt dies, but ours is just a hair too narrow to fit the hexie die.  But since we already had hopes and plans and schemes, we decided that $30 (approximate cost of the die) was cheap enough to experiment with, and proceeded to make sure we'd never be able to return it.

We shaved off several millimeters of plastic using everything in my husband's tool boxes; sand paper, planers, electric sanders.  There was an impressive amount of olive green dust all over the deck table, and the sandpaper, sure to get us some funny looks from my hubby when he got home.

But it worked! Kind of.  We ended up having to shim the die with several extra pieces of cardboard, and it was really helpful to have two people working it: one to crank and one to push/pull.  And we each got enough hexies to practice our machine piecing and make a small quilt top.

This is mine.  I think that it would make a nice hanging for the dining room, since it would pull together all the wall colors on the first floor (teal, lime, and butter yellow), but it's got so much pink that husband would probably get sick of it quickly.  Good thing I have a daughter who's proving to be very girly and has lots of wall space for when it does get booted from the dining room.

I want to trim down the long sides, cutting off all the half hexies, but leave the short ends pointy.  I think if I do a binding without a binding (a la Red Pepper Quilts) and then hand quilt with some chunky Perle cotton, it would look more wall hanging and less of an odd skinny quilt on the wall.

 Moral of the story:  Totally worth the $30 to learn something, and have a good laugh with power tools and a friend!

Linking up with Live a Colorful Life for Really Random Thursday!