With A Little Help From My Friends

WooHoo!  I finished my Yellow Circle Quilt today!!   I am thrilled it turned out as good as it did ~ thanks to all the many, many tutorials I read and watched online.  The modern quilt thing ~ to me ~ is all about the internet.  It would have taken me years to learn by trial and error what I just learned in two weeks while making this quilt.

While I have sewn my whole life, I really (REALLY) didn’t have a clue when it came to quilting.  So with this quilt I tried a few new (to me) things:

• free motion quilting
• squaring up blocks and the quilt
• spray basting
• machine stitched binding

For squaring up quilts I followed this blogpost by Naptime Quilter.  Then I spray basted my quilt.  I didn’t see any tutorials the way I ended up doing it… I used the same technique we use when spray gluing paper, I will do a little tutorial myself here in few days to show you, because it worked out so fantastically I’m never using pins again!!

After the quilt was basted I started free motion quilting.  Now… I haven’t ever used my machine for this because I didn’t have the right presser foot or feed dog cover… BUT I’ve made a few purchases recently.  I’d like to introduce you to my new friends:

Yep!  I got a nice darning foot and walking foot, and a cover for the feed dogs… and holy crap what a difference it makes!  So I practiced a few different free motion patterns and decided on one and got to town.

Then I squared up the whole quilt and did the binding.  I found a few really good tutorials on this too, but the best one was this one from Red Pepper Quilts.  I followed the instructions carefully and used the walking foot and I have to say, I’m pretty happy with the results:

For me, I think this is the best quilt I’ve made so far!  Here’s the back:

Funny, but I made this quilt to test some technical things, so I thought I would turn out a bit more messy or problematic… but now I’m getting attached to it and am thinking a nice yellow quilt would look soooo nice in the living room 🙂