I finished the quilt!

In the end I machined sewed (not very well) the binding to the back of the quilt. It certainly saved time and I will definitely do it again. However, I need to keep in mind a few things:

1. Cut the binding strips 2″ wide rather than 2.5″.
2. Once I’ve attached the binding to the front iron it away from the front.

This should mean that when I stitch in the ditch on the front (made by attaching the binding) I should just catch the binding at the back.

Another baby is on the way – due at the end of February (not me obviously!).

It is 30 charm squares and a white border. I bought the charm squares ages ago from the Fat Quarter Shop (sorry I can’t remember the name). Everything including the backing and wadding came from my stash (slightly embarrassing that I have so much stock piled).

I just quilted it using my swirly free motion quilting (see picture below).

This time I didn’t lower the feed dogs while doing free motion quilting. I read about it here and thought I would experiment. To be honest I can’t see that it made much difference – I won’t be dropping the feed dogs in future. I did change the stitch length to zero and everything seem to work as normal – there are a few places where my stitches are too big, but that will just get better with practice.

This quilt came together really quickly – about 5 hours so far and all I have left is the binding.

I’m still here working on this quilt. So much cutting, sewing back together and then cutting again.

The individual blocks are finished. I’m going to use white for the sashing and I’m just waiting for that to arrive (from here).

I’ve started work on a new quilt for Miss P. I’m using three different types of dinosaur fabric – there is a blue base very similar to the green in the image above as well. This quilt is going to consist of nine patch blocks and solid blocks with white sashing.

My current plan is to have a girly grown up backing, so when she is over the whole dinosaur craze she can simply flip the quilt over.

I finished this sampler – I’ve blurred the name and birth date in the middle.

Here is the back …

I used 2.5 inch strips to bind the quilt. This worked much better for me than 2 inch strips.

I quilted in straight lines using a stitch length of 3.5mm – the normal setting for my machine is 2.2mm – I think the longer length does make for nicer quilting.

School’s back – both Miss A and Miss P seem happy with their new teachers and classes.

The image above (I don’t want to reveal the whole thing just yet…) is a quilt I’m working on. The fabric is from Materalise – I just bought fat quarter packs.

Can I just say starching the fabric makes everything much easier – the cutting, the sewing and the quilting.

I’ve been doing a bit of blog house keeping, updated the blogroll and changed a few settings (in particular I changed to my local time so it won’t look like I’m posting in the middle of the night!).

I’ve cut the fabric for a new quilt.

School holidays continue – another week and a half – and we’re all suffering a bit from a lack of routine. I think it’s important that Miss A and P get bored and need to use their imaginations, but it is a bit wearying.

I’ve made a patchwork card to go with this quilt present.  I foundation piece the block (using my embroidery machine) and then attach it to the card using double-sided sticky tape.

You can find the embroidery files on my Machine Embroidery Page.