Monday 6 August 2012

Sweet Baby is Quilted!

I have been intently focused on completing my quilt Sweet Baby before the impending baby shower on August 12. (Okay, so I may have had a slight distraction assembling my HST block for the QAL I just started, but we can pretend that didn't happen). I got her all quilted! I used my walking foot and Mettler white thread (a first for me) to do straight line stitching through all the white sashing and between the blocks horizontally. I picked up some variegated King Tut in light pink but after finishing all the quilting in white I couldn't stand the thought of taking away from the crisp look of the unquilted arrows. I decided to leave them.


I have discovered a whole-quilt picture does not show the quilting AT ALL. Note to self for future.
I also decided to try machine binding for the first time, using this tutorial from Rita at my all-time favourite blog Red Pepper Quilts. I had mixed results. It did go faster, and my fingers didn't feel like falling off, and it mostly worked.


Here is a picture where it mostly worked. It is a little far in from the edge of the binding for my taste, but I think that is why Rita uses more narrow binding.




And here is a picture where it totally didn't work at all. I think it is because when I squared up the quilt there was a bit more width at the edges of these pieces (my dumb fault, another note to self for future projects) and so the binding didn't go far enough.
I "fixed" it by flipping the quilt and machine quilting the other way, but it isn't exactly a pretty solution. I'm hoping the recipient will appreciate the overall quilt and not even notice my mistakes (or think they are quaint and add character). I would machine bind again, but I think this is definitely one of those things you need to practice ALOT before you are as good as, say, Rita.


I will post a glamour photo shoot of Sweet Baby soon (I hope).


Lynn (Buttons)

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