Thursday, June 10, 2010

Olivia Making a Circular Quilt

Made the ironing board much shorter so that Olivia could iron the quilt she's working on for the county fair.

Had Olivia look on Flickr for ideas about what she wanted her quilt to look like. She saw on that was circular that had a rainbow of colors on a white background.

Her idea was to take a lot of fabric that had blue in it (her favorite color) and make the circle. The inside of the circle and background will be white.

Not sure yet how she's going to quilt the top. She'll need to figure that out next week.

I helped her by showing her how to make a circle, dividing it into parts (she drew the lines), and making a pattern piece (adding 1/4 inch on each long side for the seam allowance).

She cut the pieces out and sewed them together (I need to operate the pedal since her feet don't reach the floor).

Since we were creating our own pattern, she did need to add a couple of extra pieces to the circle. However, by doing this and modifying some of the seam allowances, the circle quilt now lays flat.

In this case, the quilt is more about the PROCESS of sewing rather than the PRODUCT. She's learning how to create a pattern, machine sew unusual shapes together, modify a project so that it can be taken to the next stage, hand-sew and try to hide the stitching, and how to iron.

No comments: