A small finished quilt!

No, it’s not the big quilt from the pictures I posted a little while back, I haven’t worked on it in the meantime because I couldn’t make up my mind whether to use cotton or polyester batting. So I made a small quilt with cotton batting since I’d worked with polyester before. I used some fabric I had initially ordered for the big quilt but then decided not to use. (I think I ordered quarter yards of Kona Cotton Solids in about 40 colours but only used two dozen in the end.) The colours are called ruby, orange, peacock and cactus.

While I was trying new things I thought I’d give free-motion quilting a try. I have a darning foot for my grandma’s machine, but it turns out that free-motion quilting is quite hard if you have to operate the turning wheel with one hand every time you start or stop sewing. This means that you can only hold the quilt with one hand and thus lose a lot of control over it. I tried twelve different designs, some of which I found at Leah Day’s Free Motion Quilting Filler Project and some of which I made up myself. After I had so little success with the darning foot, I changed to the presser foot and had much better results although the going was very slow. The quilting looks alright on the front, but the back shows some minor errors which are very well visible because I used white fabric for the back.

Another new thing I tried was sewing one-step binding on by machine. It worked for the most part, but the mitered corners look a bit bulky because of the seam allowances from the two colours that meet at each corner.

All in all, I think it turned out alright, and I learnt a lot while sewing this 60 x 80 cm (24 x 32 inch) quilt. Here’s a photo, but it’s a bit dark because the sun was already setting. (Yes, the grass in our garden is very dry, we seem to have a bit of a heat wave at the moment…)