Quilt Update

I said it the last post that I’m using fusible batting and I can confirm its amazing!

My first four blocks are mostly quilted.

To start with I stitched in the ditch around each of the patterned fabrics, then went on to add borders 1/4 inch out from those which was easy enough, just following my quilting foot as a guide. But then I came into a bit of an issue. I wanted to quilt a border 2 inches out from that line and I just couldn’t figure out how to do it. My normal machine foot has an attachment for a quilting guide (not that its very good, it moves when I try to use it!) but my walking foot doesn’t. In the end I routed out a pack of dpn knitting needles and attached one to my sewing machine with some tape at 2 inches to get a straight line. Am I missing something obvious? Surely there’s a normal way to do this?

It worked in any case.

 

After that I added a final border to keep the edges neat and fabric all together. The stitches are close enough to the edge to be covered during the joining stage but should be just about far enough in to not be cut off when squaring.

Now that I’ve quilted the edges I know I could square the blocks off but I’m not going to until I’ve done ALL the blocks just to make sure they all end up the same size.

After lots of helpful pointers on my last update post, I deciding on colour matching my threads and settled on using yellow for the three yellowish fabrics and a blue for the three bluer fabrics. I had these in my stash.

I’ve done the straight line quilting over the pattern fabrics, I’m a little worried this is going to end up a little too densely quilted and not very drapey. I think I’ll keep the quilting over the patterned fabrics a little further apart next time. I haven’t done it on the rectangle block as I will have to wait and see if it will be lain horizontal or vertical in the final quilt.

I ended up keeping the thread for the back white and used yellow on top. There are little dots of yellow on the back if you look really closely but its not that noticeable. And I knew I wanted to keep the back mostly white but the more I thought about it the more I wanted a colour on the colour fabrics.

There is still a little bit of quilting to do. I didn’t manage to get on to the free motion quilting that I want to do to finish these four blocks as I need to make a start on my mothers birthday present if I have any chance of that being done by her birthday at the end of April. (especially considering we are going away next week!)

But that will be the last bit of quilting I need to do (granted it’s also the most difficult bit) so I’m almost there with my first set of blocks. Just five more sets to go!

It went pretty quickly so I’m back to hoping that I might manage to get this quilt done by the end of the year!

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