Cheryl's Quilt - Putting it all Together Again

Finally got around to continuing on Cheryl's quilt. If you missed the story around this please click HERE.

Well, I literally undid most of the quilt. The issue started with the finished quilt top, i.e. it was not squared off properly. Once I had removed all the borders and done an initial squaring off, I looked at it again. Got a bit nervous re cutting as this is not my quilt and I had visions of completely messing it up. When I looked at it again I realised that I was not going to get it straight unless I undid the centre seam as this was somewhat crooked....so, undid this too and sewed it back together again and that did the trick. The quilt top was as square as I was going to get it.

After that I re-attached the purple/reddish border ...no problems here other than that some of the fabric had frayed as I had washed the strips (and starched the hell out of them). If you have followed this you would notice that I got rid of a narrow  inner pink border. I did ask Cheryl re this and she did not mind, but I just could not face dealing with a narrow, frayed strip of material. Anyway, also fixed Cheryl's method of sewing strips together...instead of a vertical seam, I was able to attach the strips with a 45 degree seam and was able to place it in a way that I got rid of one of those tiny holes that were present. Very pleased with myself at this point.

 

Now the next border (pieced strips of fabric) was very tricky...in sewing them together Cheryl must not have looked at the straightness of the strips after sewing them together. When ironed out, I realised that they were bowed and had a good 1/4inch variance in them. So out came the cutter again...this felt quite brutal but I trimmed them by 1/4 inch to straighten them out and this worked fine.

As I was on a roll, I also re-attached the outer green borders. Similar issue with accuracy so I also trimmed these by 1/4 inch. Also noticed that Cheryl left the selvage in one of the border strips (they were cut on the lengthwise grain). For any new quilter out there...selvage edges always get removed, even when sewing little pieces together as they have a different density to the rest of the fabric and hence can pull the fabric in and possibly create some ripples. I trimmed some of this off but given that it runs the entire length of the border I am left with half of the selvage edge on the binding side.

As Cheryl had some fabric left over, I was able to replace the one strip with the major hole in the outer green border with a new strip. Was very happy with that as I did not have a clue on how to fix that hole.

So I am at the basting stage ...only need to attend to some holes in the backing fabric.



Before

After - with inner border removed

In terms of quilting I am not sure what best to do with this. You can see that the quilt top is bowing out a bit in the middle which is further enhanced by the lengthwise cut borders (I cut my borders on the crosswise grain...I think it just has that added give in the borders). Given that the matching of the intersections is a bit out on most of the seams I am not sure whether I can quilt this in-the-ditch (of course you can, but that would involve major hassle with constantly breaking thread). In order to do any motif quilting, I would have to do some stitching-in-the ditch first to stabilise the quilt. Hmm...one could be radical and quilt-in-the-ditch freehand...that could work but not sure I want to do that. Will wait with decision around this until after the basting. The basting should give me a good idea on how the quilt feels and behaves...that should give me some clues. If it appears that stitching-in-the ditch might be too troublesome, I will do an overall design (stipple?) on the quilt.

Also need to find some binding fabric. Cheryl had cut the binding strips also on the lengthwise grain and that created additional problems with this quilt. I am going to get just matching solid green material and replace this.

Anyway, that's where I am up to....linking up to Anything Goes Linky Party at Stitch by Stitch

Until next time

Karin