LyndaLand: Learning New Techniques

The sewing field rings with ways to accomplish tasks related to the endeavor. I have read thousands of pages of blogs and books, articles and manuals, novels and instruction sheets and still I find new ways that women, usually altho men do quilt too, have devised of doing particular tasks.

Case in point: I am creating a quilt for a graduate who's on her way to Massachusetts for college in the fall and I want to send her off with a nice piece that she wont be ashamed to have on her bed or chair in her dorm room and later she can take with her to her new home. I decided what I would do-many blocks, various sizes, with "made fabric" wherein one sews together scraps until a piece of "fabric" the correct size is attained. So I have been making those blocks for a couple weeks now and then since they vary in size by and inch or so in any direction and wouldn't look good all pushed up against one another I decided to float them on pale blue heavyweight linen. So then the next problem was the raw edges and how to deal with them. Several solutions came and went in my mind: turning the edges under and sewing them down; leaving them raw and fringing them; encasing them in bias binding tape and then sewing them down to the linen background. None of these really seemed to be right. Then today, as I am perusing how others label their creations I came up on a paragraph by a woman named Penny from June of 2012 with the ideal solution for my problem:

"Rather than try and turn under a quarter inch before hand stitching the label in place, I face the label with some stabilizer. Stitch the stabilizer to the front of the label using a quarter inch seam all the way around with your machine. Then slash the stabilizer and flip it to the back of the label encasing all of your seams. As the stabilizer is now on the back of the label, there is no need to stitch up the slash where you turned it inside out. Stabilizer is so lightweight that it adds very little bulk and can be attached to your quilt by hand stitches or machine. I usually machine stitch labels on quilts that will be frequently washed."

The two bolts of 36 inch wide muslin under my workbench suddenly became the Cloth of the Hour as I realized that this could work for my current quilt dilemma. So I cut muslin in the correct size, stitched it all around and neatly sliced it in the back. I turned the pieces right side out and ironed them crisp. Delightful solution !~! Thank you, mysterious Penny, whose name was not clickable so I couldn't follow you to your profile. If you read this and see yourself please comment and tell me so I can properly thank you for this ever so smart solution to the Label discussion and also to fixing my dilemma with the quilt applique.