Okay, okay, it’s my bad, I should have hung up my design wall as soon as I moved in to my new home BUT instead I procrastinated although I was convinced I had all the necessary hardware.
This morning since my design study group is meeting tomorrow I decided I really must do something about the design wall. Out comes the industrial gray felt with the hanging tabs, out comes my box of hardware, out comes the rubbing alcohol to clean the wall.
The wall is cleaned, the felt is smoothed out all ready to hang.
OBSTACLE! what I thought was removable strips for the plastic hooks turns out to be a pack of Velcro removable strips to go directly on the back of a picture frame. I need the kind with adhesive on both sides to stick to the back of the hooks.
Pause to kick myself (because I did a mega-shop yesterday and could certainly have bought the right product had I realized) and to wonder also why they package three of these Velcro doohickeys when the illustration on the back shows putting two on the back of the picture frame? Why do I wonder, it’s so they can make everyone buy two packs in order to hang two pictures, and then have two left over.
Don’t let me rant about this way of packaging that forces you to buy more than you need or can use. Our dustbin lid went missing recently. New dustbin but will anyone sell you a lid?
Anyway back to the drawing board, er, I mean design wall, and back to a supply I can’t do without, i.e. masking tape! It’s not pretty but for now it will do.
The two columns on the left are sewn together and the other three columns are still under design. I’ll let it percolate for a bit and probably move things around.
The colour palette is analagous, which was the design exercise we had set for ourselves at our first meeting. It was interesting to see what others made of this, because I was the only person to use a neutral in my design.
It’s good to have feedback from supportive friends who ‘get it’ because originally the bottom corner looked like this (more or less, excuse the masking tape!) I had focused on the fact that the structure of that block makes it a good corner block, but five fresh sets of eyes noted that the weight/volume is much too light.
After some reverse sewing I was ready to replace the offending block. Set-in seam strikes fear into my heart, but I found a terrific YouTube tutorial by Kaye Wood which I watched several times and followed, and I’m quite pleased with the result:
Here’s a close up of the set in corner. Kaye’s method is very simple.
My only regret is that I got confused and the part which I planned to have on the outside corner isn’t. However I think with a new to me technique and all the seams it’s better to quit while I’m ahead. Am I being a wuss, what do you think? You can tell me, I can take it!
All the tutorials online show how to do y-seams as part of a block like Bright Hopes, Tumbling Blocks or Grandmother’s Flower Garden. No one has posted a tutorial on “sewing round corners when you need to fix a design flub.” Hmm, an unmet need.
Text/Isle 