Thursday 1 March 2012

Strip Quilt with free-motion quilting

I finished this little quilt a while back, but kept accidentally deleting the photos I'd taken so its taken me a while to post about it.  The idea is from a Modern Quilting book I bought called Block Party - The Modern Quilting Bee by AH Carlton & K Lejnieks and it was so quick to put together.





My favourite part was the minimal measuring.  You just stitch together  pieces of different widths of fabrics into strips slightly longer than the length you want each block to be.


Then press and square them off along each long end.

And then sew on pieces of the background fabric to the long edges to make up each block, using one or 2 strips in each block.  Then arrange the blocks how you like & sew them all together.  Easy.

I tried my hand at free-motion quilting using a large meandering pattern all over the quilt and it turned out ok.  If you look closely you can see some mistakes, but none too noticeable and once I've washed it a few times I'm sure they will be even less so.  I didn't have the quilting gloves lots of bloggers say are useful in directing the fabric while quilting, but a pair of disposable surgical gloves with roughed finger pads did the trick for me.

Here's a close up of the quilting.

This quilting business is a little more addictive than I ever thought it would be....