It's been awhile and I'm excited to share good news with you all. Some of you may know that I was co-chair on the MQG Charity Quilt challenge last year for our Valley MQG. Many hands were involved on this project. We all were very happy that our charity quilt was beautifully finished and hung in Nashville. Since I got all the blocks that our guild members made, I set out to use them up by making both a lap size and a baby size charity quilt for our Philanthropy group which I wrote about them here. With a happy dance and a big smile on my face, I'm very happy to say that the quilts are finally DONE.
I used a Juki TL-98E to quilt this project because my Janome 6500 was in the shop. I wanted to get the quilts done in time for our local quilt show in May, but then I got really sick in March. I resumed working on the quilt after I got well but the quilting didn't come out right as shown in the picture below. The real quilt looked worse than what is shown in the picture here. A friend suggested using steam but the ripples wouldn't go away. The small area at the bottom right wasn't so bad but the whole thing looked terrible to me.
I picked out all the quilting lines. Yes, all of them! I brought the quilt to our March guild meeting to find answers to the problem I had. One of the ladies in the guild gracefully volunteered to finish it for me, which I was very thankful. She used her long-arm machine and followed the same theme with circle motifs all over but then she had to have a shoulder replacement surgery. I got the quilt back on the last week of April. I stared at it on my design wall for a long time and tried to decide how I was going to finish it. I didn't want to do circles again, fearing that I would have the same problem. I saw that all the circles were on the right side of the quilt so I decided to do some wavy line and straight line quilting on the colored blocks and straight line quilting on the background as in the pictures below. This time around, I used my Janome 6500 to do the quilting.
After the quilting was done, I did machine binding on both quilts to speed up the process. I'm very pleased with the way the corners turned out as shown in the picture below. I found excellent tips on machine binding at Julie Cefalu's blog called thecraftyquilter.com. I want to give a shout out to Julie and thank her for all she has done for the quilting community. Check out her blog, if you haven't already, for more helpful tips and techniques. There are a lot of things going on at her website. The instructions were very clear and straight forward which I followed except that I used left over 3" strips as binding. I sewed 3/8" seam allowance on the back in order to have a wider finish at the front.
Now that my commitments are done, I can move on to other projects. I have a few patterns in mind that I want to make. I'm crossing my fingers and hope for the best that they will come out good......
Have a great quilty time everyone!!!
Link to Sew fresh quilts: letsbeesocial, Midweek Makers@QuiltFabrication
Also link to Can I get a Whoop Whoop and Finished {or Not!} Friday
