Quilting the first three quilts

At this point, I want to finish the first three quilts. My sewing area is not very large, and I need to create space. I store the quilt tops in shoeboxes between steps, and think the tops will be better served if I quilt them to a back and secure the edges with binding.

In the last post, I covered how I prepare for quilting. I will do this for each of the three quilts. The placement of the safety pins will depend upon what I come up with for the quilting. However, I usually try to quilt along a seam line. I think this is called 'stitching in the ditch.'

Starting in order, I pinned eo-1 (the kaleidoscope quilt) first.

You can see that the backing fabric is a red cotton. It is not a Kona cotton. Joann's does not sell wide pieces of Kona cotton.

I use my old White sewing machine for everything. Here, I worked with a regular walking foot, white polyester thread for the top and red for the bottom. My stitch length setting is a 2.5 (out of a maximum of 4).

When I quilt something small, I tend to roll it up for maneuverability. You can see that I quilted along the 'circles' formed with nine blocks - in an 's-curve' format. The result is that the pattern on the back resembles a sinusoidal waveform oscillating in place.

This quilting pattern is pretty simple - and enabled me to start off the quilt, cross the quilt, and then return. I would back-stitch at each end of the quilt to avoid adding any tension to the thread.

Once I had finished the quilting, I trimmed the edges on each side to remove the extra backing and batting. From the beginning of pinning to the final trim, this process required about three hours of my time.