chevron wedding quilt (part three)

**Alert! This is going to be a bit of a long post because I'll be writing today about the quilting and binding steps, as well as showing photos of the finished project. After spending so many hours on this quilt, I'm really eager to just have it out in the world. Enjoy!**

When I left you off on the progress on my sister's wedding quilt (previously written about here and here), I had so far:
• taken wedding reception fabric + coordinating fabrics and cut them into triangles
• paired the triangles together to make squares
• counted the squares and designed a chevron-pattern layout in Illustrator
• sewed the squares into rows
• sewed the rows into a quilt top
• laid out the backing, batting, and quilt top and pinned them together.

On a small scale, like a doll quilt or a baby quilt (both of which I've made several of before), this doesn't take much forethought or effort, but this was my first queen-sized quilt and the logistics were way beyond me.

When it came time to sew the layers together, I had free-motion quilting in mind. In the end, I decided to go a different way because: a) I don't own a long arm quilting machine; b) hiring someone else to do it is way too rich for my blood; and c) it would have taken three weeks before it was returned to me. So I scrapped my plan and my "out-of-my-league" ambitions, and went with something a little simpler.

I started out by "stitching in the ditch". That is, with every row and column, I stitched along the seam, hidden in the crease. Then, along each diagonal, I borrowed a method from Rachel Denbow over at Smile and Wave and stitched along either side of the seam to emphasize the chevron pattern on the back.

With a large quilt and a regular-size sewing machine, what made this possible was using thin quilt batting and keeping the quilt rolled as I worked on a section at a time. If I hadn't taken the time to keep the quilt rolled, I would have ended up with a bunchy mess or possibly with weird corners of the quilt sewed together.

I used scraps to make the binding using this method, again using a tutorial from Smile and Wave. Basically, I cut all my leftover squares into three-inch wide strips and stitched them together.

After ironing, I attached the binding by following the tutorial seen here. It looked really, really nice. By far the nicest quilt binding I've ever made. Also the most labor-intensive, so there's definitely a connection between effort and results on projects like this.

To finish things off, I embroidered a mason jar with their initials onto the back of the quilt.

When all of the machine sewing, hand sewing, and embroidery were finished, I tossed the quilt into the dryer with a couple of dryer sheets and two damp hand towels to give it a finished look, a fresh smell, and to help remove some of the cat hair my house tends to add to projects. Nothing's worse than a labor of love covered in pet hair. (exaggeration)

Phew! So the next step was to wrap it off and send it. I'm sure those of you who've attempted a project like this can empathize with that stress. I wrapped it in parchment paper, put it in a cardboard box, and absolutely covered the box in packing tape. And then I paid for an extra $250 worth of insurance, because dammit, if anything happened to it in transit, I knew I didn't have the moxie to start a new one right away and I'd just have to buy her a quilt. I had my eye on this one.

Luckily it arrived in stellar condition, and my sister loves it to bits. I hope it lasts a long time in her happy home, and survives to be the heirloom I mean it to be. 

Thanks for reading along as I tackled this! Top tip for anyone who might be thinking about starting their first large quilt: take time for all those time-consuming preparatory steps. I'm an anxious crafter and I tend to prefer immediate results, but I'm always happier with the final product (always) when I take time for things like measuring and ironing and trimming. Word to the wise.

p.s. you can make these photos larger by clicking on them, but I'm sure you already knew that, clever you!

chevron wedding quilt (part two)

Pinning the quilt (started this summer, last mentioned here in November, finished very recently), took a little more than four hours and seven hundred pins, which wasn't much considering I worried about how to do it for a month.

I was lucky enough to have a more quilt-experienced friend to advise me to move my furniture and tape the backing to the floor super-taut. I used high-tack blue masking tape to stretch it a bit at a time, then layered and smoothed the batting and the top into place.

I pinned starting near the center, then towards the margins in quadrants, a pin in each seam and corner, and more along the edge.

Anyway, that's it for now. Anyone struggling with how, exactly, a gigantic, room-sized quilt gets pinned together in the middle of the night before a preschooler can ix-nay the ork-way, now has a bit of a heads-up, complete with nighttime photos.

More soon! Thanks for reading.

chevron wedding quilt (part one)

I'm a bit in over my depth here, having never completed a queen-sized quilt. But I'm making progress.

Here are the square patches, each stitched from two triangles of grey/yellow/black/white fabric.

Most of the fabric was used on the tables at my sister's wedding reception, with some filler from the fabric store in the same color range.

After I'd used up all of my fabric making blocks, I made a chart in Illustrator to work out the pattern. I counted my patches and made a simple replica of each one, grouping, copying, and pasting the right number of copies before arranging them in a simple chevron pattern.

Much easier than trying to find a wide, clean, preschooler-free space to lay everything out, believe it or not. I'm using shaded overlays to keep track of which areas I've already completed: the white shaded areas on the left are completed; the grey shaded area is stitched into short rows, waiting to be assembled to finish that section.

The blocks are coming together. Instead of long strips, I sewed the first 2/3 of the top in nine- or twelve-block sections and then sewed the sections together. The hope was that I'd keep the corners well-aligned this way, but you can tell from the photos that despite my careful ironing, trimming and sewing, there are still some "off" corners. I'm trying not to obsess over it, with limited success.

The good news is that with the prep work done, the the sewing is going quickly. The bad news is that I have no idea at all how to stitch all the layers together on something so large, and still keep the wrinkles at bay. We'll have to wait and see how that goes.

This careful measuring, ironing, trimming, etc. is very different from the way I usually work with my hands. This is more like graphic design, where I treasure rulers and rules. So it's a switch, but I'm enjoying it, I think.

Wish me luck with the finishing stages!