Feather Study 28 Finished & Another Facing Method

Hi all -

Sorry for the long absence! I had other stuff going on and just hadn't gotten a project to an interesting point so I didn't have anything to post about. But now I have another finish so I'm ready to share! But I finally finished my Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry quilt, so today I have something to share. Yea!

Just to remind you, I started this quilt in a class in Houston several years ago. It's Caryl's Feather Study 28 pattern and here is the finished top:

(It's from a kit, so I can't take credit for the beautiful colors.)

Since it's a small quilt, I just used spray basting to make the quilt sandwich. I didn't want it to be puffy so I sandwiched it with a single layer of Warm & Natural cotton batting. I started off by doing stitch-in-the-ditch with invisible thread to stabilize everything. When I do SID, I stitch every seam that defines a line that I want to emphasize in the quilt. For this quilt, that meant that I stitched all of the seams that make up the feathers and their stems, but didn't stitch the seams between the background pieces because I wanted to unify the background. Since it's invisible thread, I can't show you this quilting in pictures.

The first visible quilting I did was the stems. I wanted to make them look rounded so I quilted them with C shapes:

I think that worked pretty well. My next quilting was in the foreground of the feathers, where I (not surprisingly) quilted tiny feathers:

And for the backgrounds of the feathers, I decided to use matchstick quilting:

I think it all looks pretty good together. The background was harder for me to figure out. I wanted to imply motion with the quilting -- I wanted the fronds to wave back and forth. I decided to start with echo quilting just on the left side of each frond. My thought was that this would be like the echo-like lines you draw on one side of a moving object in a cartoon:

I wouldn't be able to tell if this works until I finished the background quilting. The final choice was the background quilting and that was a really hard decision for me. I knew that it needed to be very dense since it had to be at least as dense as the foreground quilting. And I wanted lines that were somewhat horizontal to show the back-and-forth motion of the fronds. I didn't want it to be simple matchstick quilting since I'd already used that in the background of the feathers, but I wanted it to feel like the matchstick quilting for cohesion. I finally decided on wavy horizontal lines following the motion of the quilt. I started by drawing some registration lines with blue water-soluable marker to try to keep the lines in each background section looking like they were continuous. I added some flame shapes periodically to help me fill in spaces and to add some interest and some swirl to the motion. Here's what a little section looked like:

You can see the registration lines that I used. Here's the whole thing:

I love the look of it, but I'm not sure that I succeeded in making the background lines look continuous. It was really hard for me to follow the registration lines rather than making my background lines perpendicular to the edges of the feathers.

Now it was time to finish the edges. I decided to do a faced edge because I didn't have a good fabric for a binding and I thought it would look better without a frame anyway. I've already done a tutorial on one facing method, but I decided to try something slightly different this time.

This time I was going to do each border as a separate piece. That would allow me to understitch the edges. I started by sewing strips to the sides that were slightly shorter than the sides:

Actually, I started by sewing one side and then decided to sew twill tape around the edges because the side was trying to stretch as I sewed it:

I wasn't sure how the twill tape would work with a faced edge, but I figured that it couldn't hurt. So it was after sewing on the twill tape that I went back and sewed on the second side of the facing.

And then I realized that I had made a mistake. For this type of facing, the shorter sides end up underneath the full top and bottom, which means that the top and bottom pieces have to be sewn on first. Duh! So I had to do some unsewing, which included unsewing some of the twill tape that was put on after that first side.

Frustrating, but almost anything can be fixed! So, I sewed on the top and bottom strips:

And then sewed the side strips back into place:

Now it was time for the understitching. To understitch, you fold the facing piece over, leaving the raw edge of the quilt in place, then stitch along the edge of the fold, stitching the facing to the quilt edge. This makes it easier to get a clean edge when you fold the facing to the back.

It was harder to understitch the top and bottom. Basically, I folded the facing over the best I could and understitched just the areas I could reach, leaving the corners without understitching. It doesn't hurt anything to have spots that aren't understitched.

I then just clipped the corners, turned the facing to the back and hand-stitched it down:

I haven't figured out how to get the corners perfect yet, but I still really like how it turned out:

And here are a few more close-ups of the quilting. I'm not sure why the color is so far off in these pictures:

I added the hanging sleeve:

but haven't added the label yet. I need to decide on the name of this quilt, but I'm leaning towards Fronds. What do you think?

Nancy

Tutorial: Fold-Over Edge Finish

Hi all -

Today I thought I'd share an edge finish method that Leni Wiener demonstrated on a recent episode of Quilting Arts. I've been wanting to explore more edge finishes for wallhangings so I decided to use this on my latest quilt, Puppy Love. This edge finish is just like the traditional edge finish where you fold extra backing fabric over the edge of the quilt and sew it to the front, except that this method pulls the edges of the quilt over to the back. I did my edge following Leni's instructions, except that I changed the measurements and I did the sewing from the back rather than the front.

You really need to plan ahead when using this edge finish because you need to make your quilt top larger than the desired finished size. I didn't decide to use this until after the quilt was partially quilted, so I ended up making the quilt a little smaller than I had originally planned. If you are using my measurements, you'll want to make your quilt top 3/4" larger on all sides than the desired finished size. You also need to leave the edges of the quilt unquilted until after finishing them.

Here is my quilt before I started finishing the edges:

 The center of the quilt is quilted but the border is still loose. The first step is to trim all of the edges even with the top of the quilt. As mentioned above, this will be about 3/4" bigger on each edge than the final quilt will be.

Now you pull back the border on each edge of the quilt and trim the batting and backing an additional 3/4".

Once all four sides have been trimmed, the quilt looks like this from the back:

On one side, fold the extra fabric from the top in half, with the raw edge touching the raw edge of the quilt back:

Now fold the folded edge to the back of the quilt and hold it in place with glue, pins or clips. I love Wonder Clips for things like this:

Do the same on the opposite side:

On the remaining sides, fold the corners at a 45 degree angle:

Then fold the sides over twice like you did with the first two sides:

Folding the corners in this manner will give you a miter-looking corner. Once all of the sides are secured, you're ready to sew:

I sewed from the back so that I could make sure that the folded edge was caught in the stitching. With the width of the binding, the 3/4" edge gave me an approximate 1/4" edge:

This edge has a really clean look on the front:

The corners were okay but not perfect:

Once the edge was finished, I went back and did the quilting on the border. I decided to quilt it up to the stitching line:

Overall, I like the clean look and ease of this edge finish. When I use it again, I'll probably play around with other ways to do the corners to see if I can remove some of the bulk and make them a little more square.

Nancy

Tutorial: Two-Color Binding

Hi all -

Today I want to share with everyone (and record for myself for the future) how I achieved the two-color binding on this quilt:

If you look closely at the picture, you can see that the binding is both red and blue and matches up perfectly with the piecing. Here's what worked for me.

I started by making the strips of binding. I measured the red length and the blue length and figured out how much I needed of each. I made the blue binding a single length, but divided the red binding into two separate lengths:

I started with one of the red lengths. I sewed it to the quilt the same way I always do, but stopped several inches before the first color transition:

To find the transition point, I laid the red binding along the edge where it would eventually be sewn, folded it over where it would be folded when finished and made a mark with a removable pen right on the color transition point:

I then opened out the binding strip and folded it at a 45 degree angle so that the fold was right on the mark and went in the direction of the piecing This fold will end up being the stitching line:

To make sure I had everything going the right way and in the right location, I folded everything back up and laid it against the quilt:

It's hard to tell in the picture, but the raw edge of the binding piece is lined up with the raw edge of the quilt. The binding strip is then folded as if it was sewn to the quilt and the position of the fold is checked. It looked good to me so I continued on.

Next I opened up the red binding strip and drew a sewing line along the fold. This drawn line isn't really needed, but I've had trouble seeing fold lines before once I get the fabric under the needle so better to just go ahead and draw it:

I then took the blue binding strip and lined it up with the red strip and pinned it in place:

To line this up correctly, the ends of the drawn sewn line should be right on the edges of the blue binding strip. The short ends of the two binding string should be on the same side of the drawn line and the long ends of the two binding strips should both be on the other side of the drawn line. If you don't get this part right, you'll be very unhappy! I then sewed right on the folded/drawn line:

To avoid any unhappiness, check your work before doing any cutting:

Again, the raw edge of the binding is lined up with the raw edge of the quilt, and the binding is folded over to see if everything lines up and at the right angle. It looks good to me, so I opened it back out, cut off the short ends of the binding strips, finger pressed the seam allowances open and refolded the strip so it was ready to sew in place. Before sewing, I lined it up again to make sure everything looked good (you really can't check something like this too many times):

It looked good so I pinned it in place so it wouldn't shift and continued sewing the binding as usual.

When I got to the second color transition point, I repeated the above process. I stopped stitching 8 or so inches before the transition point:

I laid the binding strip along the edge of the quilt, folded it back where it would be stitched and made a mark at the color transition point. I folded the binding strip at a 45 degree angle right at that point, playing with the fold until I got it going the right direction. For this quilt, the second transition was at the opposite angle of the first. I folded everything up and laid it on the quilt just as it would be sewn to make sure that I had everything right:

When it looked good, I unfolded the binding string and drew a line along the fold so that I could see it well when sewing. I lined up the second red binding strip as described above and sewed the strips directly on the line:

Remember to check everything before doing any cutting:

I trimmed the short ends of the binding strips, finger pressed the seam allowances open and folded everything back up to be ready for sewing. To make sure that I got the binding color transition in the right place, I started by putting a pin through the binding 1/4" from the raw edge going through the seam between the blue and red binding strips. Then I pushed that pin through the color transition on the quilt 1/4" from the edge of the quilt:

I held everything in place right next to the pin, pulled the pin out and put it back in so that it could hold the layers together in the right place:

I put a couple more pins between this pin and where I had stopped stitching on the binding to keep things from shifting and sewed the binding to the quilt as usual. At this point I was done with all of my color transition points so I could finish my binding as usual.

Here's how my transition points looked when finished:

I think it worked pretty well!

If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments below. I'll do my best to answer them.

Nancy