Being Lazy Does NOT Pay Off

I'm sure most of us, if not all, have taken some kind of short for a quilt.  Waiting till a quilt top is almost complete before touching the iron, stacking up a bunch of fabrics to cut at one time, machine binding instead of hand binding, etc etc.   But most of the time shortcuts are fabulous.  They could be a great time saver, and in the end, the results are not compromised.

However, I'm not talking about those kind of shortcuts.  Nope, I'm talking about the ones that have gone BAD.  The ones that you know you should not do, but decided to anyways.  The ones that have terrible terrible outcomes.  For me, these results usually come from laziness.  Sometimes when I'm rushing to finish a project or have a good rhythm going and don't want to mess it up.  Whatever the reason, I could just sum it up as lazy.

My Example: Changing The Thread.

Have this ever happened to you?  You're sewing with one color, the bobbin is still full, the tension is great, but you have to move on to another project, and the other project needs another thread color???  Instead of switching out the bobbin and top thread I decided to just go for it.  It's a quilt top the seams threads are pretty much invisible right? WRONG.

I was putting together a quilt top with a mostly light colored theme, so I was using a beige thread - for both the top and bottom.  I had to switch over to finish my Modded quilt - which was mostly darker colors, especially the deep mocha color.  What I did next was a BIG mistake.  I give you the results of my laziness.


OOOOPS.  Yeah don't ever be lazy and not switch out the thread when the colors are so different :(.

How ugly is that??  Definitely NOT a good outcome.  Beige on mocha...not very discreet.  So I had to spend even more time fixing the problem.  Five minutes wasted, I had the seam completely ripped out.  You could see the damage at the left corner on the picture below.  Not cool.  Spent another five minutes carefully pulling out all the thread.  Waste of time and resources.

I couldn't find my black thread - thanks to my little toddler - so I opted for a dark olive thread.  It's dark enough for the mocha color and perfect for the green fabric on the quilt.


The lovely olive green thread.  Not much of it left but enough to finish the quilt top :).  Need to stock up for the quilting...though I'm not sure if I even want the quilting with this color ....

Okay so after another 5 minutes to swap out the thread and re-pinning the fabric, I am back in track.  What a difference a color change makes.


Even with the extreme closeup - the thread is barely visible.  Good, the quilt top is saved!


So lesson learn - some shortcuts are good, some are tragically bad.  And being lazy?  Better to avoid, because changes are, you'll have to spend more than correcting the mistake later.