Quilting the Challenge Quilt At this point, the quilt top is finished and ready for the quilting stage. It has been a lot of fun seeing how the the three different blocks and the applique pieces for the What’s Good For the Gal Is Good For the Guy quilt have developed and emerged into a whole entity. I love creating the individual parts of a quilt but it’s also satisfying to see it all put together. What is even more satisfying is seeing it quilted. There are few things that need to be done first before I can actually sit down and quilt.
The three layers
I already have the top layer finished and ready to go but I still need some batting and a backing for this quilt.
Curved safety pins about a fist width apart
The batting I have and I just need to cut it to the correct size. It’s 100% cotton, which is one of my favorite battings. It’s a low loft batting so will remain quite flat when quilted. If I use a batting with polyester, which has more loft, the quilt would have some puffiness to it. The backing I will create from a fabulous piece of flannel. Now, when I started the challenge way back when, the idea was to create a pieced back using some of the Eclectic Elements fabric and the backing fabric. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough of those fabrics left to create a backing. But, I do have an idea to create something else with them — shhhhh don’t tell as it’s a surprise.
A pile of binding
The backing is a single fabric in lovely blue flannel by Northcott Fabrics, which will be warm and cozy to the body.
Sandwiching the quilt
The fabric sampler
I’ve rearranged my studio and put some tables together so I can sandwich the three quilt layers together. Once the layers are all layered smoothly, it’s time to do a whole lot of pinning. I’ve made sure that the backing and batting are 2-inches larger than the quilt top all the way around. It’s always a good plan to have these two layers larger just in case there is any movement of the quilt layers. There’s nothing worse than having a section with no backing or batting.
Thread choices
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spring 2015
I prefer pinning to spray basting even though it does take longer. If you pin well, there should be minimal movement of the layers while quilting. TIP Place pins about a fist width apart — this will ensure optimal pinning for minimal movement.
Binding
I like to make the binding before quilting the quilt to have it all ready to go and I don’t accidentally use the binding fabric for something else. I decided on one of the feature fabrics for the binding — stripes in blue and tan. This fabric is going to look super framing the quilt. Plus, it looks great with the backing fabric that it is lying on. When I calculate how many strips to make for the binding, I keep it simple. All I do is add the measurements of each side together and add an extra 20-inches to ensure overlap for sewing the ends together. then, I divide by 40. Not exactly an exact science but it works for me and there isn’t all kinds of convoluted measuring or matching involved. For this quilt that’s 72" on each side, I rounded up to 80" (this will include the extra 20" I normally add), multiplied by four to get 320" and divided by 40 which equals eight strips of fabric. Easy peasy!
Picking a thread
I made a little sampler of some of the feature fabrics and the background fabrics to test a couple of threads. I did both straight stitch and free motion samples with each thread. Because all the fabrics are a bit different, it’s hard to get a thread that will blend into all the fabrics. I don’t want the thread to stand out because I feel the design is the focal point of this quilt, not the quilting. My two choices of thread are a variegated blue or a variegated gray. I’ve decided on the blue for the background and, most likely, the gray for the feature fabrics. But, I may change my mind when I start quilting the feature fabric and go with a variegated brown, since many of the blocks have a brown tinge to them.