I ran into a bit of a structural problem while sewing the pieces of my art quilt top together. Some of the panels in my piece are cotton sateen; other panels are cotton sateen covered with acrylic gel medium….so those panels are stiffer. I used satin stitch to sew these different panels together. After a few times squashing my rolled up quilt top through my sewing machine, I noticed that the fabric was tearing in small places along the satin stitch seam line, but only the fabric that was stiff was tearing a bit. I realized that the mulitple needle punches that make up satin stitch were actually acting like a perforated line on that fabric. I needed a solution, quick. Above, you can see (faintly) a tear in the fabric on the top of the seam, on the left side.
I fused about a yard of Wonder Under onto about a yard of muslin; then I cut out the wavy shapes of the seams from the muslin/fused fabric, and then actually ironed the fused fabric onto the back of the quilt top. If you look carefully at the photo below, there is a faint neutral colored area on the bottom side of the seam, on the left side, just above the letter T. Part of that creamy colored area is the fabric itself, but the smaller area near the seam is the muslin. And believe me, it’s hardly noticeable.
It took a while to do this as it was rather tedious and it put me in a bad mood.
This is my piece so far, the square window shapes haven’t been assigned permanent locations yet:
