WIP Wednesday 10/19/2011 (a skills WIP)

Instead of doing a run down of all my WIPs this week, I’m taking a look at my one little project.

This scrappy Halloween mug rug.

First of all, I can see now why people love mug rugs. 

These things really are fun to make!!

 

rawrr....crappy cell phone photo :/

 I made this little guy with scraps from the Hexi-Web project, and I already have a second one in the works.

The fact that I can brush up on my binding and quilting skills is not a bad thing either.  In fact that is the inspiration for this week’s spin on WIPS – My skills are always a work in progress!

Let’s take a look at how my techniques have progressed this week:

What I made progress on:

Quilting- eyeballed it and made the web off center

Binding on back- Hand sewn! This is the first time I’ve done binding by hand, I usually go for the quicker machine techniques. From start to finish I definitely got a lot more consistent and small stitches, yay! I don’t know if I’m quite ready to do this on a large project, but I am certainly more open to it before.

Mitered corners on front- used this technique from Crazy Mom Quilts.

Need to work on:

Quilting- Had some evil bunching issues, time to dig that walking foot out?

Mitering corners on the back- No 2 look the same, and none are particularly good. 

Anyone have any tricks for this?

Basic math- Measure twice cut once, especially on binding. See the orange and green bits of the binding? Ya. Lesson Learned.

I think a lot of times we get wrapped up in how many projects we can juggle and how many ‘finishes’ we can reach. It’s important (for me at least) but put that tally down once in a while and embrace the process. I really feel like I did that one this small project. The best part, is that seeing those little success in advances in my skills motivates me to keep sewing more than any deadline can.

Watch out! I’m on a roll!