Free Motion Floral Sampler Quilt

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A finish! Yay! This might be my first finished quilt of 2014, ugh.

For this quilt, I used the leftover blocks from my Summer Quilt. You can do this with any collection of 10″ squares. I had 25 blocks and some were duplicates.

This would look really awesome in solids or low volume prints or even alternate value prints.
I should just call this my @angelafmq sampler quilt ... ;) every block is a design from her first book.

Take your 25 blocks and lay them out on the floor or design wall until you get a pleasing arrangement. Sew two together for each row until you’ve sewn a whole row. Sew all the rows together.

(or grab two at random until you get most of the way through the stack and start sewing those pairs together. Make sure you leave enough single blocks behind to finish each row.)

Back view for texture. #quilt

For the backing, I had fabric that was 54″ wide and used that. Baste well with batting of your choice. Mine needed work.

For the quilting – this is the fun part.

I used my walking foot first and stitched in the ditch for each seam, leaving a nice square sewn for each block.

Scroll quilting.  I need practise there too. Hard to do in a square. :)

In each square, I quilted a different free motion design using the Bernina Stitch regulator on some and my free motion foot. I worked my way through Free-Motion Quilting with Angela Walters
and some of Leah Day’s free motion quilting designs as well. Have fun here! I used a white thread in the top and bottom on all fabrics.

For the binding, I trimmed the back so it was 2″ all around and folded it over to the front, then sewed it down. I screwed up trying to trim the corners so I won’t show that bit – just know there’s a gap. Sigh. I really need to work on mitring my binding, especially the “bringing the backing to the front” kind, which I don’t do often.

Nice and crinkly from the dryer.

This quilt I am leaving in my own stash for an example of the kind of quilting I can do. I hope eventually to maybe quilt for customers, so this should give them something to look at to pick quilting styles if wanted. At the very least, it showcases my skills now and I can compare it to another quilt a few years from now.

I was away so let’s talk binding

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Ooops! I went away on a business trip and all the pre-trip preparations and post-trip recovery meant no real sewing for a while.

I did baste a pile of baby quilts I had waiting, plus for two I decided to not bind them and sew together using what I call the pillow case method. The one where you place the back and front right sides together with the batting, sew around, leave a hole for turning and then turn right side out.

For the pinwheel quilt, I had a yard or so of red gingham I wanted to use for binding, which meant I had to make it myself. But I was short on time, so I hunted down an even faster method for making binding. Following this tutorial, I did not even have to mark the strips or even use my binding maker.

I also machine sewed the binding on by sewing it to the back first, then flipping the binding over to the right side and stitching it down. Repositioning my needle to the far left also helped with this step.

I’d have a picture to show you, but alas – my trip wore out my camera batteries and I forgot all about it, os right now my batteries are charging.

I think my brain batteries need charging too. 😉

And yes – I still need to post exactly how I quilted the pinwheels! I’m happy with how it turned out. I guess I did squeeze in time to actually quilt it, but not enough time to blog it.

So – how do you bind your quilts? All the same way? Different ways depending on your mood or the quilt?