4.12.2011

Q&A | The Quilting Process Part III

This is Part III of my four post series on the whole process of making my striped quilt.

Check out Part I and Part II.


Step 7: Finish the Quilt Top
I arranged my finished blocks five different ways before I decided that this was the way to go!  

I stacked up the rows in order, and to keep it all straight, each row was placed on a numbered cardboard card. This was one of the tips I learned from Oh Fransson - to cut up cereal boxes into cards, number them, and use them to stack and keep track of all of the quilt blocks.

Between each block, I added a thick strip of sashing.  Fast forward many hours/days at the sewing machine - and here's the finished quilt top.


Step 8: Sew the Quilt Back

This is about the time that I realized that this quilt was really, really big.  It's one thing to write on a sketch 88" x 100", and it's another thing to realize that that's bigger than the space you have on your living room floor!  I had bought large pieces of fabric to piece together for the back of the quilt, but they weren't quite large enough.  I added some additional striped fabric and eventually had something big enough.

In my overwhelmed state, I didn't get a picture of the pieced back of the quilt.  You'll just have to wait for the finished quilt to check it out!



Step 9: Make a Sandwich

It's a good reminder to eat a sandwich between all of these steps, but I don't mean that kind of sandwich. It's time to make the quilt sandwich!

First, the quilt back is laid right-side-down on the floor.  The batting goes on top of that.

And then the quilt top, right-side-up.  It takes lots and lots of smoothing out after each step so that there won't be any puckers in the fabric.  I felt so small compared to this huge quilt, and my arms were super tired!

Then, the pinning.  I used special quilting safety pins - they're curved - to join the three layers together. You're supposed to pin every 4 or so inches.  Can you guess how many pins it took to pin the whole quilt? OVER 500!!  Yowch.

Stay tuned for the final steps!

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3 comments:

  1. I'm at the cutting stage for my mums birthday quilt! I have some mOre fabric to iron and cut and then piece together. Then il hopefully get started on my own!

    ReplyDelete
  2. It looks absolutely massive! Did you have to rearrange your living room to lay it out?

    ReplyDelete

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