Monday, March 28, 2016

All Fired Up - The Quilting and Binding

"All Fired Up" is my second quilt as an Island Batik Ambassador.  It uses their new Fire Island line of fabrics coming soon to a quilt store near you!  Be sure to look back and see the other three parts of the series on how I made this miniature quilt!

When we last left off, the quilt was marked and ready for quilting.


I knew I wanted this quilt to be a show quilt, so I decided to use two layers of batting.  The bottom layers is Hobbs 80/20 and the top layer is Hobbs Heirloom wool. Many show quilters use two batts with wool on top to make their quilting pop.  I generally don't do this on my large quilts because it makes them really heavy, but I love to do it on my miniatures.

I then pin-basted the quilt.  It's my favorite way to baste.  Admittedly, I am a bit of an over-pinner, but my backs are FLAT.


Here is the quilt once it was quilted.  I was able to do all the feathers and outlining with just over one bobbin and the outside fill around the edges too a second bobbin!  I recently took Wild Quilting from Cristina Cameli on Craftsy and she talked about combining designs in one area which I did on the outer border.  I combined pebbles, swirled large pebbles, and outlined teardrops.  It makes the edge more interesting.


I was planning to put these feather designs pointing towards the center of the quilt, however my mom suggested that having them pointing towards each other would add an interesting design element.  I'm really glad I did it that way instead!


Here is a closeup of the feathers in the center of the quilt.  It's the first time I've not marked my feathers on a competition piece.  I am super happy with the results.


Here is a picture of the trimmed quilt before I added the binding.  You can see that I decided to do an interestingly shaped binding treatment on the edge of the quilt.  I took a class on binding in Houston a few years ago and have a great binding book to use as a reference.



Putting the binding around this shape was a challenge, but it turned out to be easier than I expected.  What was REALLY CHALLENGING was dealing with these little bitty inside points and making sure to overlap the binding in the points like you see on scalloped edged quilts.  Needless to say, this was extraordinarily hard and I decided that a mini was definitely NOT the place to learn this technique.  I finally made the decision to rip off this binding after an hour of frustration.


I then took an oval template and adjusted the edging of the quilt so it was all a flowy curve with no inside points.  I actually really like the shape and am quite happy I changed it.  I then cut new binding and sewed it on.  It was much easier the second time around!  Since the binding needed to stretch around curves I used a single layer of bias binding.


You can see that I use binding clips to hold down my binding while I sew.


TA DA!  The finished quilt.  It only took me a little over an hour to tack down the binding by hand.  It was MUCH easier to do flowy curves in the binding than points and I am VERY happy with the final results!  Off to show it goes soon.


Back to my Flower in a Pot Series on Wednesday!  Happy Quilting!
Suzy

6 comments:

  1. Suzy - Your quilt is beautiful and your quilting so beautifully done and so very impressive! You have convinced me! I've just signed up for Cristina Cameli's "Wild Quilting" class at Craftsy.com. To my great delight, it's on at half price right now! Thank you for pointing us in her direction!

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    1. I am so glad you found it! It's absolutely fabulous.

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  2. That is terrific. I love the quilting, and the way you cut and bound it is so neat!

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  3. Suzy, your work is absolutely beautiful and the binding is so neat!

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