A few weeks ago I lost a sterling silver thimble which I had bought when I first started to quilt forty years ago.  I had used it on every quilting project I had ever created during my First Act in Fiber Arts, and more recently on every quilting project created during my Second Act in Fiber Arts.

I was basting hexagons one afternoon and got up to take a short break.  I thought I threw the thimble in my little Tupperware sewing box when I walked away for a few minutes.

Upon returning my thimble was nowhere to be found.  I looked for it all over the living room.  I even turned my This End Up couch on end and tore off the pillows.  My husband even got in the act and we looked everywhere.

I felt as if I had lost a valuable part of my history, and I will admit that there was a lot of crying and sobbing going on over this incident.  It didn’t make sense, yet a few weeks after it happened, with the thimble not having materialized, I was getting ready to blog about my loss.

Then a couple days ago, while tidying up the living room in preparation for a visit from my stepdaughter and her son, I picked up a nearly empty package of tissues.

Something was peaking out of the lower edge of that package of tissues. Can you see it? When I picked up the package I didn’t see it, but I felt it.

A very bad word sprang loudly from my lips as I held the package in my hand. It was a strange reaction, I will admit. It was actually an expression of extreme joy and disbelief.  My husband was nearby and wanted to know what was wrong.  I said, “You’ll never believe what I found.”  He asked, “Your credit card?” (That’s another story.) I said, “No, even better! MY THIMBLE.”

I quickly figured out what had happened. When I came back to my stitching that day, and had been unable to find my thimble, I started to toss things out of my sewing kit in search of it.  The tissue package got tossed into a container on the sewing table with spools of thread and other miscellaneous items, and there it remained while I tore the house apart. There it remained for the next couple of weeks mocking me from the sewing table.  I guess this is proof that cleaning and organizing are good. Don’t tell my husband I said so. Notice the hexagons on the tissue packet.  I think that’s a nice touch.

This thimble had been lovingly used for forty years, which is obvious from the shape the edge has taken on over the years.

I used to carry this with me to do EPP work outside the house.  No more.  I’ve learned a lesson. If I keep the thimble at home, I can at least be fairly sure that if it goes missing again at some point, it will show up again. I do, however, enjoy using a quality thimble when I work, so I am thinking of buying a second sterling silver thimble for traveling, and I have been looking at the ones available on eBay.  If I lose a new sterling silver thimble, all I will have lost is the money necessary to replace it… no big deal.  I won’t have lost something of sentimental value.

Second Act Saturday is a recurring feature through which I share projects created during my Second Act In Fibers, but about which I have not previously blogged.  It’s a way of getting my full body of work up on the web eventually.

Today’s post is about a pillowcase that my husband requested that I make for him to cover a very old, large, and dirty pillow which he loves.  The pillow was originally covered with corduroy, but could not be laundered. At one point I covered the pillow with some flannel sheeting because it had gotten so dirty, but I actually stitched the sheeting onto the pillow, so it still couldn’t be laundered.

When I started to create objects out of hexagons my husband saw an opportunity to request a simple utilitarian cover for his beloved pillow.  I saw an opportunity to use scraps, or crumbs, left over from the creation of basted hexagons.  I also saw an opportunity to find out if the maroon fabric I had purchased was going to run if I didn’t prewash it. I was getting worried because I had read some blog posts about the value of pre washing fabric.  In addition to that, I had been doing some reading on the web about “quilt as you go” units quilted by machine and joined with strips. So I decided to try to kill as many birds as possible with this one stone. I made this pillowcase in October of 2013.

First let’s take a look at the finished pillowcase.

FRONT

BACK

A closer look shows that my fear of bleeding proved to be unfounded.

I used solid maroon fabric to back the square units from which this piece was made, so if there was going to be a bleeding problem it definitely would have shown up during the first wash.  Apparently good quality quilting cotton looks safe, even if it is in the bright red family.

On the back of the pillowcase you can see a maroon batik, which I used not only to see if it would bleed, but also to come up with an easy way to finish off the back of the pillowcase with fabric on hand that would harmonize with the maroon.

I wasn’t particularly fond of the maroon batik, but cut into narrow strips it worked well for this project, and showcased my construction method.

Let’s take a look at the pillow that desperately needing covering:

To create the pillowcase I used small rectangular crumbs that were left over from the cutting of fabric squares for the creation of basted hexagons.  I didn’t have enough crumbs to make the six 12 inch squares I needed for the front of the pillowcase, so I did end up cutting extra crumbs from fabric I had on hand.  The solid maroon strips and batik maroon strips used to unify the pieced squares, and to join the quilted squares, could not be called crumbs because they were cut from yardage. However, at least half of the pieces used on the front were actual crumbs.

I cut 13 inch squares of maroon fabric (and batting) as the base on which I built my units using strips, and sewing them into place as I added them.  After making the units they were trimmed down to 12 inches square.

 

Here we see three of the units for the front laid out on my couch before they were trimmed to the 12 inch size needed for joining.

I joined my squares using one inch strips, which come out to 1/2 inch strips on the front of the piece because half of the width is lost to the seam allowance.  The strips on the back were sewn into place by hand.

I made the pillowcase larger than it needed to be, and joined the quilted front and back with maroon yardage along the edges.  I wasn’t sure how much the pillowcase was going to shrink, and actually ended up going back and sewing it even smaller. If you look past the lint and dirt in the photograph below you can see how I added extra seams to make the pillowcase smaller after the first washing. I never did go back and cut off the excess fabric, but may do so at some point.

 

Here you can see how much fraying took place during washing.

 

I ended up cutting away a lot of frayed fabric.

I am sure that there is a way to finish off the inside to avoid the fraying, but I had never made a pillowcase, and I made this whole thing up myself as I went along.  I knew that my husband was not going to be critiquing the inside of the pillowcase, so I wasn’t too worried about what couldn’t be seen from the outside. I just wanted that dirty pillow covered.

Here we see the pillowcase flat without the pillow inside:

Once again, forgive the lint and grime.

I’m not particularly pleased with the way I constructed the open end of the pillowcase.  I should probably look for a pattern online if I do this again. Instead of hemming the fabric near the edge I should have probably used a double layer of fabric for the entire end of the pillowcase.

Love those crumbs…

Notice that no quilting shows because of the “quilt as you go” strip method used.  It creates quite a clean look.

 

When I first started to work with EPP Hexagons I noticed two distinct types of “waste” products from the production of basted hexagons. These could be referred to as crumbs. There is actually a type of quilt design referred to as crumb quilting.  Before I show examples of the two types of “crumbs” I became aware of, I will provide you with a few links to give you an idea of what crumb quilting is all about.  I didn’t want to show an example directly because I didn’t want to post someone else’s work without permission.

Here are the links:

Crumb Quilts on Pinterest

The above link gives a really good idea of what crumb quilting is all about, so you can probably skip over the links below and come back to them later if you want to see more about crumb quilting after reading the rest of my post.

Crumb Quilt Round Up

Crumb Along With Me Quilt Along

Crumb Chaos Blocks – A Photo Tutorial

Adventures In Crumb Piecing

Crumb Quilt Pattern

I take no credit for the links above except that I found them through a Google search for “Crumb Quilt Patterns”. You could surely do a similar search if you wanted to see what else is out there.

I would like to mention that the crumb quilting movement is closely related to the “made fabric” techniques that Victoria Findlay Wolfe teaches in her book “15 Minutes of Play” in which she shows a variety of methods for joining small pieces of fabric and then using the resulting “made” fabrics to piece projects.  Her pieces could rightfully be called crumb quilts. I recently bought a copy of Wolfe’s book, and have enjoyed reading it. However, when I first started EPP I was totally unaware of crumb quilting, and was also unfamiliar with Wolfe’s work. As a result, I came up with my own limited understanding of the waste products of hexagon production.

FIRST I noticed that the method I was using to make my hexagons created a great many infinitesimally tiny pieces that truly deserved the name “crumb” although I didn’t call them that. I baste my hexagons using 2.5 inch squares of fabric. Then I trim the excess fabric from the basted hexagons leaving a seam allowance of about a quarter inch.

This yields lots of tiny bits of fabric WAY to tiny to use for ANYTHING… yet I saved them. At first I just wanted to see how many I could accumulate, like a kid tying together pieces of string and winding them into a ball. I was surprised how quickly my gallon container filled and overflowed with tiny pieces of fabric. There is something obsessive about having more than a gallon of totally unusable fabric crumbs. The only purpose it serves to save them is to prove visually how much work I have put into the creation of basted hexagons.  When I fell in love with the color hunter green I decided to save those crumbs separately from all of the others since I knew I would be making so many hunter green crumbs.

SECOND I noticed that when I cut my squares of fabric using 2.5 inch strips of fabric, I inevitably ended up with pieces at the end of the strip that were narrower than 2.5 inches, yet too large to throw away.  At first I did throw these pieces away. However, since they actually looked usable, I started to save them, and to think about what I might do with them.

After awhile I started to sew the pieces together randomly into strips.

Eventually I decided to make something of these strips.  My husband had asked me to create a pillow case for a large old dirty pillow he loved, so I made it for him.  My first crumb piece was born, even though I had no idea what a crumb piece was at the time, and didn’t even know that leftover pieces of fabric were called crumbs.  My husband’s crumb pillow case will be the topic of tomorrow’s Second Act Saturday post.