Quilting, Quilting, Quilting

Before going to Austin to visit family, sewing room time was spent primarily on quilting. For the first time, using the stopwatch on my iPhone, I tracked the time I spent quilting a quilt. This is also the first time I've just let myself go, quilting-wise, to quilt whatever designs wherever I wanted.

As I shared in a previous post, this is the quilt with double batting - Quilter's Dream poly on the bottom, and Quilter's Dream wool on top. The quilt is pretty dense - like I'm not sure it will ever get cold enough in Florida to want to sleep under it! I think you can see from the photos that the double batt makes the quilt designs across the surface pop. 

"Ad Libbing" is the name chosen by Lora and me for our collaborative quilt. Between each of us making several 15" square improvisational blocks, and the anything-goes way I approached the quilting designs, this is definitely an ad libbed quilt.

I spent roughly 30-1/2 hours quilting, and used up one and a half spools of color #2800 Aurifil 50-weight thread. That's 2,100-plus yards of thread! About 3/4 of the way into the quilting, my Pfaff Grand Quilter began skipping stitches. After many failed attempts to figure out what the problem might be, I swapped out the Pfaff for my Bernina Aurora 440, and finished quilting with it. This is a great reason to always have a back-up sewing machine! (Or two.)

The next three pictures show the quilt from the back. Backing fabric is grey Widescreen, by Carolyn Friedlander.

I learned that it isn't any more difficult to quilt with a double batt than a single batt, and may actually have made it easier because of the "stiffness" of the quilting surface.

After soaking/washing the quilt in the bathtub and transferring it to the washing machine to spin out, I laid it out on the tile floor to air dry. With a laser pointer as a guide, I gently pulled and patted the wet quilt to squared-it-up. The fluffy along all the sides is the wool batt.

Personally, I like to wash and block a quilt before adding binding, to make sure the binding is sewn to a quilt that's "on the square." Lora's putting binding on this, so I'll let her decide whether to sew the binding to the quilt and then trim (as I would), or trim and then sew binding to the quilt. A concern about trimming first is that not enough batting will be left to make a full binding when it's wrapped around the quilt edge.

Ad Libbing, 78" X 78"

I'm happy to have this quilted, pleased with the way it turned out, and ready to pass it on to Lora for binding and labeling. We're planning to enter it in a couple quilt shows, so I'll let you know how that goes. Linda