Sunday 3 September 2006

Building a quilt frame

Well, yesterday was spent starting to put the frame together. The instructions that came with it says 'Plan to spend a minimum of 2-4 hours in assembly'. Who are they kidding? At the end of that first 2 hours we'd just about got it out of the boxes! We've built a lot of MFI furniture in our time and are normally pretty handy at this kind of thing but the frame was a serious hassle. It's very fiddly and there are annoying little problems such as bolts that are 3 times longer than needed so you seem to be doing them up for ages. On the plus side the hundreds of nuts, bolts, knobs and washers are all in nicely marked up ziploc bags making it very easy to identify which ones you need.

By the end of yesterday we'd pretty much got the frame together after about 9 hours of work. To make matters worse after we'd finished I found a DVD tucked down the side of the packaging I was hauling outside. This turned out to feature a rather self-conscious American lady effortlessly putting together the frame so that you can see exactly how the parts go. Bugger!

So we headed for bed, somewhat weary but with the frame together, taking up an amazing amount of room I must say.

I was up bright and early, I think the dogs were a bit surprised and I'm going to spend some time making leaders to pin the quilt to the rollers. I think I'm then ready to put the machine on and start putting together my first practice piece.

I'm really quite excited. I think the kids are too, they've abandoned morning TV to come and see what I'm doing.

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