My Year Quilt is Finished

Last time I wrote about this quilt was February last year when I had finished the last squares and was deciding what to do with them. Looking back at my posts, I am surprised that I have not written anything about my choices and the process.

In my post I said that I had purchased fabric to make the squares all the same size. I started out by adding a small border to the largest square and then sized all the squares to that. As the point of the quilt is the individual squares, I placed sashing between the squares. But I also wanted a quilt I could use so then borders were added and then it was sandwiched and then it waited. Another quilt waiting to be quilted. 

In the end I repeated to myself “finished is better than perfect” and just got on with it. Also I told myself that I couldn’t sew anything else until this was completed. (I broke this self-imposed rule when I had to make masks.) The action of quilting was hard because of the weight of the fabric so each session was no more than two hours. But a little here and there added up and I had a finished quilt. As I was not working on anything else I kept the walking foot on my machine the whole time as it is fiddly to change. (This has made me think that it would be nice to have a basic machine that I can keep set up just for quilting.)

There was no plan for the quilting. Just some circles with the darning foot and a lot of straight lines with the walking foot. As I got closer to finishing I started to think about the binding. The fabric I used for the back of the quilt was extra wide and I had just enough in the length to make a self-binding. I trimmed the backing to ¾”, folded in half, folded this over the edge of the quilt and then machined. As this is a quilt for us I did not miter the corners. I tell you, machining binding is the way to go.

I am really pleased with the result.

 

 

 

Oh, and as the impetus to finish this was so I can make some clothes for the family with fabric I’ve had for a while, what did I do? Start a new quilt completely from scraps!