Sunday, April 5, 2009

Fold Up Quilt Bindings

For BeeBee, a link to where I learned about this fold-up quilt binding:

How to Bind a Quilt. . . the easy way. at Pleasant View Schoolhouse


another cozy quilt
another cozy quilt


I remembered that I had a bunch of squares left over from the 2007 christmas quilts for the kids, and a bit of batting, so I made up another quilt for my sister's car and practiced some more free motion quilting on it. I tried use the multi colored machine quilting thread from Coats and Clark, but it kept snapping. Then I tried Coats 100% Cotton, which is the thread I generally use, and it also kept snapping! I was kind of frustrated and confused, because I didn't have a single broken thread doing Tom's quilt. I remembered I'd use Gutermann 100% cotton thread, so I pulled that out, and used it. It worked beautifully, but I'm a bit annoyed because there are only three places where I can buy it and they're all in the garment district! I'm used to being able to run to JoAnn's for more thread when I need some, so I'll have to make a point to stock up on this.

While I was poking through my quilt squares, I figured I'd see how far I've come on my Mendicino Quilt. Not too bad... just over half way there. My backing is a robin egg's blue King sized sheet, so I just need enough squares to cover it. My king sized cotton batting is quite a bit bigger than the sheet, so I'll be doing a lot of trimming I guess.
my quilt, in progress

4 comments:

BeeBee said...

Thanks, Wendy. I bookmarked it for the next go 'round

Faye Lewis said...

Thanks for your comment about my jacket. Love your quilt!

Anonymous said...

The quilt is darling. I was thinking about what you said about the thread breaking and just wondered if you tried changing your needle? Sometimes (I know it doesn't seem intuitive) that makes a difference. RosanneRosannaDana says: If you already thought of this, duh!, then "Nevermind".

wendy said...

Changing the needle was the first thing in my mind too! I did actually swap it right after the second break, since for some reason a new needle usually helps. Sadly it didn't... I think I'm still such a klutz with free motion that there's sometimes a lot of stress on the thread when I tug the fabric or lose grip, and the Gutermann must just be stronger or something.