Taming the Wild Quilt Edges

The weekend ahead will be busy, and my mind got an early start when I awakened at 2:30 a.m. and started working through all of it. After lying awake until 4:30, I decided to get up and do something productive. There will be time for a nap later.

This morning I'll head over to Working Hands Farm and pick up 40 lbs. of tomatoes. The weekend will be spent turning them into pasta sauce, salsa, and tomato jam. Just so you know what 40 lbs. of tomatoes looks like, here's a picture from last year's harvest. It's two grocery shopping bags full.

There are probably another 10 lbs. of ripe tomatoes on our own plants. Also, the plums are ripe, and so we'll be harvesting enough of those for a plum torte and a batch of plum chutney.

So, you can see there's lots to do in the kitchen. Also, the quilting is finished on the Baby Birds quilt. I don't know about you, but when a quilt is at that point, it's hard for me to relax until the binding is sewn on...at least by machine, if not by hand. Strangely, those raw quilt edges make it hard for me to rest easy.

Allow me show you the quilting. Wednesday, I was working on some feathered flowers. The patchwork areas that day were rather small, and Thursday's quilting taught me that this design is better worked in large areas. When I moved to the larger areas of the quilt, it felt so freeing! Here's how it looks now.

If you watched the video from yesterday's post, then you know she went on at some length about choosing the direction you wanted to travel and how to end up at the right place. My spatially- challenged mind was having the hardest time with that. I kept drawing the motif in the air with my finger again and again thinking about which direction I wanted to go and what that required of my stitching. Eventually, I figured out that the hook in the center needed to point in the direction I wanted to travel. Duh. This next image illustrates what I mean. I was at the edge of the quilt when I started the center hook, and so I wanted my "petals" to end up on the other side from there. Knowing that, I pointed the "hook" in that direction.

Once I had that figured out, I flew. It was perhaps the first time I've ever felt truly comfortable and "in the groove" so to speak so that the stitching flowed easily and I could relax into the motion of free motion quilting.

The last thing I needed to do was to outline the wing on the baby bird. This looks much better.

With that finished, I yanked the quilt out from under my needle and spread it out on the floor.

Here's how it looks from the back.

This quilt is for my cousin's newest granddaughter, expected to arrive in October. She might have to fight Sadie for this quilt.

You made this for me, right? I'm your baby, right? That baby will have to get her own.

So there I lay this morning, thinking about those raw quilt edges, and finally, I got up to sew on the binding. As you might expect, the furry nocturnals were there supporting me every step of the way.

As I got ready to cut the binding strips, I noticed this in the selvage edge.

So there you go...a little message from the quilting gods. A little over an hour later, those edges were tamed, and I could relax.

All that's left is the hand-stitching...and tomatoes...lots and lots of tomatoes.