Stitch in the Ditch

Note: The internet nearly ruined this perfectly good blog idea. I won't spoil it for you until the end.

Last weekend, I cleaned off the Boy's desk in the dining room that was covered with quadcopters and other flying devices, old homework, and random magazines. It was the place where Claire-Adele dumped the junk mail after clearing it from the dining room table so she could set it for dinner. I bought this desk a few years ago to give the Boy a quiet and clean spot to do his homework. Since this desk had been covered in crap since 2012, he did his homework on the couch or in his bed.

I decided to claim this table for my sewing, which is logical because it is a sewing table that I tried to pass off on the Boy for his own, knowing very well that I wanted this desk, but really couldn't justify buying myself a third desk in addition to the one off the kitchen and the one in the shed. This desk is a really nice piece of furniture--spalted maple with an antique Singer sewing table legs. Before I would sew on the dining room table, which was a huge pain because I had to move everything on and off the table before and after we ate. I don't have a before picture of the desk, but I have an after.

Some of the Boy's flying devices are still under the desk.

This weekend I've bee working on a quilt I started last winter. It is the quilt I would have wanted when I was ten years old. It has bright rainbow-y colors, treehouses and bicycles. It is awesome. I am kind of sad Claire-Adele doesn't want it, but oh well. She is seventeen and has lost her interest in things whimsical.

For the top quilting, I am trying something new: Stitch in the ditch. This is where the lines are sewn inside the seams of the patchwork. 

This is nearly impossible to do right. The truly bizarre thing is that when it is done perfectly, you can't tell that it has been done at all. So why do quilters try to do something so impossible that you can't see? Why? It doesn't make any sense. There is something zen about trying to do the impossible that can't even be seen when done properly. How do you learn how to do this? You start when you are fourteen and by time you are sixty-five you can be mildly competent?

Here are my good and bad examples. You can see I nail it about 15% of the time. Where did I get it right? You can't see it. Crazy, eh?

As I sat down to write this, I googled "Stitch in the ditch" to make sure I had the term right and I discovered there is a sewing foot especially designed to do the stitch in the ditch that could have made it all easier.