Winter Tips

Naw .... not for ‘that’ kind of winter. The following tips are for my ‘Winters of My Life’ quilt on the previous posts.

I love to combine machine and hand quilting on the same quilt. There are drawbacks to this kind of quilting, though, and my quilt had problems. It would not square up ……. and I’m talking major out of whack.

Since there was a lot of close stipple quilting, the quilting really shrunk together a lot in those areas and my hand quilting was not so closely quilted and I could see differences right away between the blocks. I should have taken a ‘before’ photo so that you could really see the difference. Next time, I will be sure to do that for you as I will be combining the two methods again.

What to do about it? Well ….. for one thing …… I use long lengths of quilting thread and don’t tie them off when I get to corners or at the selvedge edges or even in the middle of the sashing. Once my quilt is finished and washed and blocked and dried, those loose ends will be used to help square up the quilt.

I grab those threads and start to gather up the quilting in the borders and in the sashing and in the ditches until I start to see that the quilt is squaring up. The threads are not gathered up too much in one area but are gently gathered up from one end to the other. This method is subtle and hardly noticeable in the end; but my quilt is finally square and then the threads are popped into the quilt and trimmed off.

The other problem was with my free form piecing of one tree. There was just not enough material in the seam and after being quilted, the seam came loose and there was a gap. What to do? A scrap of the same material patched it up. You really have to look closely to see the patch.

When I bought the snowflakes, they were white. Three were needed to stand out against the white background; so I painted them royal blue. There is a clear coating on top so that the paint won’t rub off the buttons.

Have a great day!