Finish!

I finished hand-sewing the binding onto my blue quilt on Monday, but my laptop was out of commission so I couldn't post pictures about it until today.

Here's the entire quilt so that you can admire the wide variety of totally random fabrics that went into it.

And here's one including my helpful quilt holder.

I quilted it in little spirals, which I thought looked sort of like wind or water and were therefore appropriate for a blue quilt. It's the biggest quilt that I've quilted so far - roughly 60" x 80". It wasn't that bad to manipulate through my machine during free motion quilting, but it sure did use up a lot of thread! I had to go buy more half-way through quilting it because I ran out.

I waffled on the binding for quite a while. I considered about 8 different fabrics and finally narrowed it down to this one and a solid blue one. The solid blue one was just too boring. It's a pretty bold choice of binding for me and I'm not sure that I *love* it, but it was good to try a binding that stands out. I like how the red-and-blue brings out the bright colors in the other fabrics, but I don't have a very good picture that shows the binding in relation to the whole quilt.

Construction details:

Piecing thread: I was doing this as a leader / ender project, so it's pieced with whatever thread I was using for the "real" project I was working on.

Piecing needle: variable for the same reason.

Batting: warm&white cotton

Quilting needle: size 75 quilting needle

Quilting thread: blue variegated Signature size 40 cotton thread; same thread as for the river quilt. This is why I ran out half-way through.

Tension: increased to about 6.

Assembling a quilt sandwich

Every tutorial I've ever seen on assembling a quilt sandwich tells you to lay the backing out on a hard surface: your giant, attractively tiled kitchen floor; those several large folding tables that you keep stored in your ample basement; your living room's reclaimed oak or ecologically-responsible bamboo floor. For those of us who live in smallish apartments with crappy wall-to-wall carpet, this doesn't work well.

I've been assembling quilt sandwiches in my kitchen. At the widest point with available floor space (i.e. not under the table), it measures about 5' across. This works fine for putting together small or lap-size quilts. Larger quilts have to be assembled in the living room, where there is floor space, but where there is also carpet. The backs of quilts assembled in my living room have up-till-now contained puckers and wrinkles because I couldn't get them to stay flat.

I was thinking about putting together the quilt sandwich for my blue quilt and wondering where I could go to lay it out on a hard floor (my mother's house? school? the grocery store?) when it occurred to me that all I really needed was tent stakes. Well, not literally tent stakes, but that idea: something to hold the backing fabric stretched out on the living room floor.

I decided to try using my largest size of safety pins. I stabbed them through the backing fabric and into the woven part at the back of the carpet. It actually held quite well.

I didn't take a picture of just the backing fabric for the blue quilt because it's large enough that, in order to fit it all into the frame, you wouldn't be able to see the safety pins. Here's a smaller-size reproduction:

If you look carefully, you can see the pins at the top and sides of the fabric. I "staked" the backing down, then went back and repositioned the pins to pull any loose areas tighter.

After pinning, the back seemed to be quite flat. I'll post after I finish quilting with a pucker-and-wrinkle-report.

Blue Quilt

I decided to follow Bonnie Hunter's advice and always "find one more unit to leave under the presser foot as you chain piece." She recently published a book called "Leaders and Enders" which talks about how to sew the blocks for one quilt in between sewing other projects. At least, I'm assuming that's what the book says. I don't actually have the book... but I think she posted about it on her blog or it used to be somewhere on her website or something. I can't find it now, but I got the basic idea down: have a simple piecing project that can start or finish a chain piecing series.

I pulled blues out of my bin of 4.5"x4.5" blocks and started sewing them together into 9-patches. I started this project a number of months ago and it's been sort of plugging along while I've been working on other things. Finally, I finished sewing all my 9-patches, then I made them "disappear" in order to make things a little more interesting.

I carefully arranged them all (on a friend's living room floor) in a pleasing pattern and labeled each block (130 total) with a little piece of masking tape so I wouldn't screw up the order. I finished sewing them all together during Quilting and Eating Day with Ciara.

Here's the end result, after being pinned into a quilt sandwich in my living room.

It's very blue.