I looked back on my emails and I had ordered the pattern for Grainline Studio's Tamarack Jacket on September 11 of this year. Amongst packing and moving, cleaning and organizing the new house, working (so I can pay for the new house and my sewing habit), yoga teacher training, work trips and trips for fun, and time for relaxation and fun (phew - it has been a busy busy last few months!!), I've been working towards and on the jacket since then. Despite all of that, I've actually made quite good progress. I picked out the fabrics, washed and dried them, and bought all of the notions. This past week I stopped off at a local quilt shop that I hadn't visited before to buy batting for the jacket. Ends up they have way more than quilting supplies in that store, so now that is another option for buying sewing supplies aside from Joann Fabrics around here.
Assembling the Tamarack Jacket involves quilting the lining, batting and outer fabric together. This is all new to me, so I spent the last few days working out how best to ensure that the lining fabric doesn't get pulled oddly during quilting. I've chosen what I thought was the easiest quilting design - basically just creating rectangles - but when I started basting (let's be real - I don't understand the purpose of basting and every time a pattern requests to do it, I find out that I didn't really need to baste) the first lines, I realized the flannel lining fabric was pulling, so I needed to ensure it was at least pulling in a way that would look symmetrical! So as I was quilting the back piece of the jacket, I sewed both of the initial vertical quilting lines from the bottom up and then for each of the horizontal lines, I began sewing them from the center line out. I'll include a photo showing how the back piece came out in my next post, but for now here's some photos and explanation of the pulling I'm talking about.
You can see below how the initial vertical quilting lines began pulling the fabric up:
And below by how much it was pulling the lining fabric up - about a half inch. The lining is the colorful flannel, the black is the batting and then the grey is the outer fabric:
Below you can see how it is coming out as I sew the horizontal quilting lines from the center out. You can see that once I get to a vertical quilting line, there is some excess fabric and it is pulled a bit.
That's all for today!