To be a bit cliché, this shoemaker is a professional Web Developer and her child is this blog, but it was past time to launch what I have of a new design. All the content is still here, everything else is a work in progress (kind of like most of my sewing projects)!
Is your fabric organza or organdy? What is the difference? The similarity in names for these two fabrics causes a lot of confusion. Both are sheer, crisp, plain-weave fabrics. The difference comes down to the type of yarn used to create the fabric.
Organdy, or organdie, is typically made of cotton fibers. The yarn is spun, meaning it is created by spinning together short fibers (called staple fibers) to create a long, continuous thread.
Organza is made of filament yarn, which is made from very long fibers, such as silk. Filament yarn is most often made of synthetic fibers in modern times, so most modern organza is synthetic, such as polyester, however silk organza can still be purchased.
That’s it. The difference is simply the type of fibers used: filament or staple.
Wondering what the difference between any other fabrics are? Let me know in the comments, and I’ll try to answer. Make sure to subscribe to my RSS feed so that you get your answer as soon as I publish it.
With the color runs done for the bargello quilt, it’s time to start cutting out the strips for the quilt top. On one hand, it sounds simple: the pattern from the book tells me the widths I need for each piece… I just need to cut, right? But, in practice, the color shift across the quilt, combined with my plans to insert the purple “pop” pieces meant graphing it all out was a superb idea—and also the next step in my homework, along with starting to sew the pieces together.
Seam alignment and graphing
My teacher suggested using Microsoft Excel or a similar program to graph it all out, so I started with that, but it wasn’t lining up in a way that made sense. When cutting and piecing together your strips for Bargello, you have two basic choices: line the horizontal seams up, or stagger them. The quilt pattern I’m using is a staggered pattern (think brick laying)—so when I blocked it all out in a spreadsheet, everything was misaligned. Working from a pattern that is not staggered would have severely thrown off my piecing, since it changes the starting color of each row.
Plan two, which I should have done in the first place (considering it is what I’ve done in the past) was to open up Adobe Illustrator and block it out in that program. (Your mileage—especially if you’re not familiar with the program—may vary.)
Here’s what I came up with.
The first image has no color shifting. The second is the result straight from the instructions. Before deciding to use the pattern as-is from the book (well, prior to purple-izing it), I spent some time playing around with the color shifting as well. It’s quite simple to just swap the color of the blocks, although the color is clearly a poor substitution for the actual fabrics.
Adding the purple twist
Once I had a good graph of the color run cutting and color shifting, it was time to plan out my purple accent rows. This required a lot more playing. I knew that I wanted to do a competing curve rather than simply follow the existing ones. Ultimately, I decided on this structure:
When the curve directly mirrors the main curve, adding in my accents simply requires swapping out blocks. However, when the curve happens to correlate with the main curve, that approach will result in the purple completely taking over another color for a few blocks, which I didn’t want. This results in some trickier half-block replacements in certain rows. Having this graph to guide me is immensely useful.
If you’re interested in making a similar quilt or want to see a more detailed explanation of these modifications, you can download this pdf of my adjusted pattern complete with cutting widths.
So, at present, I’m cutting out all of my columns and inserting the color shift blocks and purple accent blocks—which requires a lot of seam ripping. There’s no solid goal for next class—just to have started piecing everything together and to bring in any questions we’ve come up with. Next time I update, I’ll be showing you progress of piecing together the rows.
What tools do you normally use to plan out your quilts (bargello or other)?
Two weeks ago, I showed you my color choices and pattern for the bargello quilt I’m making as part of a bi-weekly class. Our homework before this week’s class was to create our color map and have all of our fabric cut into strips and sewn into color runs for the quilt.
Bargello quilts are made by strip piecing, which means sewing together long strips of fabric, and then cutting the result to create the pieces used in piecing together the quilt. The foundation of the bargello technique is using strip piecing to create color runs: rectangles of fabric made from equal-width strips of your fabric. The color runs are then cut perpendicular to the sewn seams in different widths to create the curves of the quilt.
The pattern I chose has rather tall rows—3″. That means, all of my strips were cut to 3.5″ (for a 1/4″ seam allowance on both sides). Cutting was simple with a rotary cutter, mat and 6×24″ ruler. Then it was time to actually start sewing!
One place Wright and Edie differ is how to sew together your color runs. The most difficult part of this step is to create the color run without having the strips begin to dip in the center—called bowing. To counteract this tendency, both Wright and Edie recommend altering each seam direction as you create your color run. So, you sew the first seam in one direction and the next one the opposite, and keep switching back and forth.
Wright suggests sewing all of your strips in pairs with the same seam direction: 1 to 2, 3 to 4, 5 to 6, etc. Then, you sew your pairs to each other with seams going the opposite way, continuing to sew the groups together until the color run is finished.
Edie takes the sequential approach and has you sew each piece to the next in order, switching seam directions as you go. Wright’s recommended method is a bit faster I think, since you can chain piece all the pairs, and is the one I chose to use.
Another place Wright and Edie differ is how to place the ends of the strips. Wright proposes to line them up evenly on one end, creating only one jagged end (due to differences between manufacturer’s fabric widths). Edie counsels arranging the ends based off the shortest strip, creating two jagged edges that supposedly allows you to have more useable strips. I figure, the shortest is the shortest, regardless of how ends are set up and used Wright’s way instead. Only one jagged end also makes Wright’s method a little less confusing: when you sew the pairs, you sew from the side where the edges meet. When you sew all the other seams, you sew from the uneven side; this is an easy way to tell which direction you should be sewing your seam.
Using Wright’s method, I didn’t experience notable bowing. In addition to the speed advantage that I spoke of, I also think that her method keeps you from making exponential errors. If you sew each piece to the next one, any previous bowing will continue to get worse as the issue is compounded down the line. When you sew the groups together, you don’t experience as much of an issue because you are working in smaller chunks that don’t inherit the mistakes of each previous piece.
Unfortunately, I missed Monday’s class (and a day of work) with some sort of bug. I did find out today that the homework is to start cutting the actual strips from the color runs and piecing them together, so I’ll be talking about that in my next post. Also, please forgive me for the poor quality images. My phone’s camera had to do, as the real camera was unavailable.
Do you have a preference for either of these methods? Tell us about your experiences in the comments.
This is part two in a multi-part series. Keep following along by subscribing to the RSS feed, or view the related posts.