Added Binding to Pink and Gray Quilt

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well and had a wonderful Memorial Day holiday! Life here is good. I made it to the nursery last week to pick up some flowers for the deck. I got them potted and am enjoying them. I plan to pick up some more tomorrow. I like to keep adding to my collection as we move into summer!

This week I mainly worked on my pink and gray quilt. I continued to work on the quilting. I decided to do some simple ruler work in the centers of the blocks. I decided to quilt curved lines around the edges of the center block and also across the middle of the block 

Pink and Gray Quilt - Center Block Quilting Design

This should be simple to do and also provide the needed stability. The curves around the outside of the block allowed me to do this quilting without any extra starts and stops. I have a bunch of arc-shaped rulers to choose from. To figure out which curve would work best for this, I drew a 6" square on a piece of paper in pen, then drew the quilting in pencil using the different rulers and a 1/4" spacer that I got years ago. I can put my pencil tip inside the center hole on this spacer and run it along the edge of a ruler to get the stitching line that I would get when using that ruler.

Pink and Gray Quilt - Quilting Ruler Spacer

With my chosen ruler, I concentrated on quilting all of the blocks on the outside edges of the quilt. I wanted to get these done so that I could bind the quilt because the gloves I use for quilting really pick up the batting fluff and that drives me crazy so I like to get the binding on the quilt as soon as possible. Once I got the outside blocks quilted, I could concentrate on the binding. I had thought that the fabric that I have with the pink and gray stripes would be the perfect binding for this quilt.

Pink and Gray Quilt - Auditioning Striped Binding

Pink and Gray Quilt - Auditioning Striped Binding

I tried the striped fabric both with the stripes at a diagonal (which I thought would be perfect) and with the stripes straight up and down, but didn't like either. I felt like this fabric was too light and bright and would draw attention away from the center of the quilt. Next I auditioned one of the polka dot fabrics.

Pink and Gray Quilt - Auditioning Polka Dot Fabric

I thought this was better, but was still too much for the binding, so I tried a more subdued polka dot fabric.

Pink and Gray Quilt - Auditioning Subdued Polka Dots

I liked this a lot better and decided to go for it. I then spent this weekend applying the binding. I like to sew the binding to the front of the quilt with the sewing machine, then fold it to the back and hand stitch it. It's a lot of work, but looks the cleanest to me.

Pink and Gray Quilt - Finished Binding on Front

Pink and Gray Quilt - Finished Binding on Back

Pink and Gray Quilt - Quilting Close-Up

Now I can go back and finish the quilting in the rest of the blocks.

This week we also had the first meeting of a new cross stitch group in one of my quilt guilds. The organizers didn't know if there would be much interest in the group, but we had thirteen ladies show up for the first meeting! I did some work on my Flying Beauties cross stitch.

Flying Beauties

It was a really great group and a lot of fun to have others to share my cross stitch with! The only down side was that I found out about a Web site that has some really cute downloadable cross stitch patterns, so I did end up spending some money! 😁 I look forward to our next monthly meeting!

Finally, i was able to get a little bit more done on my sampler from the big stitch class.

Big Stitch Sampler - Left Side

Big Stitch Sampler - Right Side

I would like to finish the sampler to get more practice at getting even stitches, but I'm getting annoyed with the pleats in the sandwich. I didn't have any painter's tape when we did the sandwiching, so I wasn't able to stabilize the back and get everything flat. One helpful thing I learned this week is that I probably don't want to use Valdani thread for big stitching a quilt. I used Valdani thread for the grid at the bottom of the right side of the sampler and had a lot of problem with the thread fraying. It just didn't stand up to all of the fabric and batting layers like the other brands of perl cotton I tried. It's still a lovely thread for embroidery, but doesn't work for me for this application. A great thing to learn from a sampler!

Nancy