My quilting ideas have been coming fast and furious lately, and I am realizing there are not enough hours in the day to do all the projects I want to do, and I’m going to have to sew smarter not harder.
A while back I made a post about using leaders and enders when chain piecing my quilting. To recap briefly, a leader/ender is a piece of material that you sew off of onto your project at the start of a seam, and off of your project and onto the scrap at the end of the seam. There are a number of benefits to using leaders and enders: 1) no thread barf because of the machine pulling the top thread down into the bobbin area and balling it all up on the back of your seam 2) no thread tails to clip at the ends of seams 3) less thread used because the leader/ender is typically shorter than the thread tails would be and 4) you can work with needle down turned on and never have to raise your needle. I’ve used this technique for years for really nice clean seams and better use of my thread.
A lot of people take it one step further by sewing a seam from another project, instead of using scraps for leaders and enders. Some are as basic as just keeping a stack of squares next to the machine and sewing two together as a leader and ender. Others actually have an entire project cut out and work their way through that sewing as the leader and ender. I’ve never been able to accomplish this as I am rarely organized enough to have a second project sitting next to the machine. I also get carried away with the leader/ender project and find myself sewing that project exclusively, reverting to scraps as my leaders and enders.
That is about to change. There was a plot in a movie one time, where a computer programmer at a company told the computer to take all of the fractions of a cent that were left over from transactions that were being processed and drop them into his bank account. In short order he was a millionaire because all of those fractions of cents added up. I am realizing that the seams on my leaders and enders that I am sewing could really add up to another project if I could ‘deposit’ them into the right ‘account’. Talk about becoming a chain piecing millionaire.
I know if this is going to be successful I have to keep my leaders and enders to a simple project. I don’t have a lot of real estate next to my machine to stage a large project, plus I need to make it small enough that I don’t get carried away with the second project. I’ve had an idea in mind for a while for a double four patch, which requires a lot of little four patches. Two hundred little four patches. If I keep a stock of them cut and ready to sew, I can use those as my leaders and enders. Two hundred seems like a lot but we don’t realize how many seams we stop and start over the course of a project.
I will hold myself accountable here, and I’ll post updates as I work through things. I hope the biggest update will be the LOOK I MADE TWO PROJECTS AT THE SAME TIME post but we will see. Start small, finish big.
