These two fabric strips on my design wall have been causing a fair amount of consternation in the Serendipity Studio this week. I’ve been working on my piece for the first Twelve by Twelve 2012 challenge – Metamorphosis.
It soon became apparent that I might not have enough of the background fabric to complete my composition. Thinking ahead, I cut these two strips to reserve them for facings.
I proceeded with my composition: scrimping with careful cutting and narrow seams; enlarging certain figure elements; substituting the background with some other hand-dyed fabrics and finally patching in some shot cotton that was a better colour match. Alas, by the time I joined all the pieces together and quilted them, the composition had shrunk to 11 1/2 inches wide and less than 20 inches long. Arghh.
What to do? In the end, I trimmed that quilted piece with batting to almost the specified size 20x12in and artfully applied a binding finish rather than facings. Facings finishes involve folding the edge of the piece to the back of the quilt, thereby reducing the size of the work, whereas bindings just go around the edge. By some kind of metamorphosis, the piece ended up the right size. Of course, my carefully measured facing strips were not big enough for the binding so I could have used them in my piece after all!
Watch out for the grand reveal over on the Twelve by Twelve blog on 12 February (US time).
