I don’t prewash my fabrics, and I realize that I should expect some shrinkage when I eventually do wash a finished piece, but I wasn’t sure how much to expect.  So it was with a bit of dread that I washed my first large finished hexagon piece, which is a panel that I created to hang between the living room and hallway during the summer to keep the cold air in the living room and the dining room.  I call the piece “Room Divider Number One”. It will hang between the living room and the hallway.

In order to have a frame of reference for the shrinkage of future work made with hexagons, I took measurements before washing and drying the piece.  It was 36 inches wide and 90 inches long before laundering.  I washed and dried it using the gentle cycles on my home washing and drying machines.  After laundering, the piece measured 34 inches wide and 86 inches long.  This means that the piece shrank more width wise than length wise.  For every 18 inches of width I lost an inch due to shrinkage.  For every 22.5 inches of length I lost an inch due to shrinkage.

The piece shrank more than expected. I got really lucky because it exactly fits the width of the space where it needs to hang. In fact, there may be the slightest bit of gap between the piece and the wall when hung. If it had shrunk any more it would not be able to serve its purpose because it would have allowed cool air to pass along the sides. I might have had to cut it up to repurpose it.  That might have been an interesting exercise in modern quilting, but it would have been a bit tragic.

Since this is the first piece I have ever washed using hexagons I got to see the crinkly effect I can expect to see in the future when pieces such as this are washed.  I am a bit conflicted over the effect, and wonder how much is due to shrinkage of fabric, and how much is due to shrinkage of the cotton batting I used.  Below are images of the front and the back of the quilted piece.

In my previous quilting life, about 25 years ago, I pre washed my fabrics and used polyester batting exclusively.  Those quilts do not crinkle like this.  I probably should do some sample pieces to experiment a little and observe the results.

I call this piece “Room Divider Number Two”  It was created to hang between the dining room and the kitchen during the summer months when we have our window unit air conditioner installed in the dining room.  A similar unit “Room Divider Number One” was designed to hang between the dining room and the hallway.

Last week I decided to finish “Number Two” and spent two days quilting the five inch border strips and adding the binding.  The quilting on the border strips took approximately six hours to achieve, and the binding may have taken another six between the piecing, machine stitching to the front, and hand binding on the back.

I had allowed the panel to remain unfinished for about a month while I decided how to quilt the borders.  I had initially thought that I might use semi circles, but was unsure what to trace and what type of pen or pencil to use to do the drawing.  I finally decided to use tape as a guide to follow while doing my quilting.  I ended up creating a design of outward pointing arrows on the borders.

I really enjoyed quilting in a larger expanse of fabric as opposed to just making lines of quilting down the middle of rows of hexagons.  One thing I decided to do was to begin my threads and end them as well with knots at the edge of the borders where the binding would hide the knots.  It seemed easier to do that than to bury the ends elsewhere with quilting knots.

Above you can see the method that I used for marking my quilting on the borders.

Above you can see what the finished quilting looks like on the borders.

Binding provided more hours of handwork fun.

The final results were kitty approved, as usual.

I am storing my images on Flickr.  If you click on any of the links above you will be taken to my photo stream on Flickr where you can see more images related to this piece.

Last night I attended the Central Jersey chapter of the Modern Quilt Guild for the second  time.  I decided to join because I really enjoyed the company of this group of creative women, and I believe that getting out once a month to interact with others would be good for me.  I have my doubts about whether I fit in with the modern quilt movement due to my emphasis on handwork.  My work is more traditional than modern, but these people appear to be very inclusive, and I don’t think that my orientation will be much of a problem.  Besides, seeing what others are doing will help to ease me out of my comfort zone.

While filling out the form for membership I came upon a entry asking if I had a web page or a blog.  I thought, “Well, this really is the moment of truth, isn’t it?”  You see, I hadn’t been 100% dedicated to this domain name, nor to being hosted on WordPress.com.   I have a self hosted domain, which is my own name, plus I have a blog over on Blogger, called Enriching My Love of the Game, which I had maintained for a number of years related to a board game that I play.  I’d been thinking of changing the subject matter of that blog to include my quilting, or using my own name domain, terrischurter.com, which I have been saving for heaven knows what.  I even tried posting recently to that blog with an entry related to my quilting.  I’ll probably repost that entry here soon.

Looking at the names of blogs that pop up in the Quilting category in my Zite application installed on my iPad, I have noticed that the domain names run the gamut.  Some are clearly quilt related like Red Pepper Quilts and Fresh Lemons Quilts, though these names may not really mean anything.  Some blogs use the author’s name as the domain name, like Pat Sloan. I imagine that those people are famous enough to justify that.  Pat Sloan certainly is, but was this always so, or did these people grow into their fame as they blogged?  Some of the domains are clearly self hosted, which is a superior choice in terms of flexibility, but many are tied to services like WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, and the like.

All of these observations have left me feeling conflicted over how to proceed.  I paid for this domain, which I can carry with me if I ever leave WordPress, so I probably ought to stop procrastinating and start blogging with it in ernest.

So, last night when I filled out my membership  form I entered “hexylady.com” as my blog name.  I guess that commits me, at least for the short term.

During the meeting we were asked if anyone was interested in blogging.  One of the members said that they would be happy to meet with other members and help them get started with blogging.  I indicated my interest saying that I already have a blog, but that I haven’t done much with it.  When I mentioned the name “hexylady.com” someone in the group said that they had seen it, which surprised me.  Perhaps there is some other blog out there with a similar name. I have so few entries so far that it is hard to believe that anyone would have seen this blog or linked to it, especially since I haven’t categorized my entries, or promoted my blog in any way, but I suppose it is possible that the entries may be showing up on WordPress.

I know that The Central Jersey chapter of the Modern Quilt Guild has links to member blogs on their web page, so at some point in the near future this blog will probably be included there. That alone may be worth the price of membership.