Katharine McCormick: Finishing Touches

We’re done! It seems like we have been working on our Katharine McCormick project forever, but it’s been closer to nine months. Today we thought we’d tell you about some of the finishing touches. There are links at the bottom of the page to all of the posts about our KDM project.

Boo-boos

It’s not like we didn’t make more than a few boo-boos, but here’s one fun example. At some point in the process of making the boa, we had set fabric to steam, and the fabric came out BLUE! It was a lovely blue, but we were making a black and white boa. There’s always the back, we thought, so we scavenged through our fabric stash. Having found a bunch of blue and white fabric, we patched the back together, adding in the blue text pieces as we sewed.

 

Mistyfuse

We don’t talk much about actually putting our “sandwich” together: front, back, batting. We used to pin the three layers together, but then we heard a short presentation from our friend and fellow SAQA member, Judy Coates Perez, on how she uses Mistyfuse fusible web to keep her layers together while quilting. We became fast converts. It really makes quilting much easier because we don’t have to contend with pins or basting stitches. You can see all the tiny Mistyfuse squares on the batting of this piece. Thanks, Judy, for this great hint!

 

Quilting

If you are familiar with our work, you’ll notice that we tend to use our signature “tatami mat” stitching. Whether vertical or horizontal, we like the irregular straight lines. They don’t detract from the text, allowing it to remain legible. However, throughout the construction phase, we could not decide how to quilt the piece. Hand or machine quilt? Tatami mat stitching? And then there was thread color. Our tendency is to use black because it makes a bold visual statement.

Seriously, we sat on the quilt for at least a month where it could have been quilted because we just didn’t know what would make the piece look better. Deb finally said she was willing to try some machine-quilted spirals on the face, so Kris tried some hand stitching. The spirals looked great, so we went for them . . . in an orange thread, no less. In the end, though, we held fast to the tatami mat stitching for the background, using a blue thread this time. It made the portrait pop out, and we liked that effect.

 

 

Leftie/Rightie Advantage

We tend to face our quilts instead of using the traditional binding method. It’s just a personal preference. Perhaps because the quilt looks more painterly, but it’s also a lot easier. When we’re blocking the quilt and cutting off excess fabric, we like to do it together because we have the distinct advantage of Deb being right-handed and Kris being left-handed. We never have to turn the quilt to cut all the edges! Collaboration can sometimes be a difficult task (remember how long it took us to decide how to quilt the piece!), but having both a leftie and a rightie in the room does come in handy.

 

 

Boa

You can click on the boa link at the bottom of this post to read about how we constructed the boa, but it was another challenge to actually mount it to the quilt and have it stay there. Leave it to Deb, our great engineer, to figure out that all we needed to do was sew the supporting twine to the quilt with strong beading thread to tack it down. Then some supporting stitching afterward did the trick. The hard part was actually placing the boa. After we first pinned the boa, we realized that we wanted to show more of McCormick’s neck, so we had to do quite a bit of fiddling.

 

 

Leftovers

What do you do with your test pieces? For this project, we printed extra faces to practice quilting on, so Kris’ dog, Mr. Darcy, got a new blankie. He loves it!

 

 

So now we’re done and are just waiting for the day this fall when we get to send off our quilt. Deeds Not Words: Celebrating 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage premieres at the National Quilt Museum in Paducah, Kentucky during Quilt Week in 2020.

 

Other Posts on our KDM Project

• Katharine McCormick: Making Her Mark Part I
• Katharine McCormick: Creating a Cartoon
• Katharine McCormick: Choosing a Face Color
• Katharine McCormick: The Facelift
• Katharine McCormick and MIT
• Katharine McCormick: Two Diaphragms are Better Than One
• Katharine McCormick: The Boa
• Katharine McCormick: Reading T.C. Boyle’s “Riven Rock”