Leaders and Enders
While sewing a quilt seems like such a simple thing I have
mental issues about waste. I don’t like
wasting thread between bits of sewing, so I employ a process described by a
dear friend, Bonnie Hunter, which she calls leaders/enders. Bonnie is the Queen of efficiency and makes
more quilts than anyone can imagine. You
can check out what she does on her website and can find a link to her blog
there.
Bonnie is amazing and does quilt
retreats for guilds and travels all over showing people her methods, all the
while still managing to produce an unbelievable amount of quilts, get books
published and sew up fabric that people who love her mail to her.
I have followed her progress for years by looking at her
website on occasion, and when I needed to know a method short cut or the math
for sizing setting triangles I would just automatically go to her website and
find my answer. Always while there I
would check to see if she had any new patterns or to see what she had in progress. Her site is always an inspiration.
One of the things that Bonnie prescribed was having a second
project going and as you stopped at the end of a seam on your current project,
you would sew two pieces of fabric together from this second project and keep
those little pieces in their container.
As you work on a project and sew off between seams with the
leader/enders, you first get parts of, then blocks to a whole ‘nother project
and in a year’s time of sewing quilt tops, I could manage to get at least two
“free” quilts this way. The little
blocks keep you from having long threads that you have to cut off as you sew. I’m
sure my explanation is confusing as words, so I have pictures.
.JPG)
.JPG)
leader/ender
The hard part of this prescription for not wasting bits of
thread means you have to be organized enough to actually have a second project
thought up, planned out and cut and ready to sew. I’m not as organized as Bonnie and I don’t
have so many sizes of scraps available to pull from but I have made my own
method to please my crazy brain. What I
end up with for my leaders/enders projects has fondly become what another
friend calls Quilt in a Box.
I can plan out a quilt and cut all the fabric for it and
never stress over my choices because it is a PROJECT and it is READY TO
GO! I have a nice stash of quilts in
boxes on the shelves under my ironing board.
I am ready!
She's make me compulsive enough to sew a row of charity quilt blocks as leader/enders, but I'm here to tell you, when I get to the end of the row I pull out enough thread to be darn sure my needle won't unthread when I start the next row.
ReplyDelete