Friday again - and not only Friday, but three-weeks-until-Christmas Friday!! Oh my! I'm sure most of you are working on things you can't share, but I hope you can join in the fun and whoop it up a little bit - so let's get started!
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I decided this year that I was finally going to use the three jelly rolls of Kate Spain's Solstice that I had been hoarding saving for the perfect quilt - and because it's Christmas fabric, I was compelled to finish it in time for this Christmas! I wanted a king size quilt for our new bed, and not just a king size, but a huge one, with plenty of "drop" on three sides so that rolling over wouldn't leave anyone short of covers.
Because this quilt was going to be so big, it wouldn't fit on my quilt frame in one piece, so I quilted it in two long sections. My original plan was to use a layer of wool batting and a layer of cotton batting, but when I started quilting it, I found it to be too puffy, so I took out the cotton batting. The wool batt gave just the right amount of loft!
Here's the first half fresh off the frame! Then, second verse, same as the first, I quilted the other half.
Then came the fun and adventurous part - joining the two halves! I found a great tutorial that covered exactly what I wanted to do, and if you are interested in doing the same, I highly recommend that you check it out. She did an excellent job of explaining how and I don't think I can add much here. So - I trimmed one side through all the layers, then pinned it to the pieced top on the other side, folding back the batting and backing.
Once the two pieces were joined, I pressed the seam allowance towards the pieced side, trimmed the batting to meet the edge I just pressed over, and trimmed the backing to 1" beyond the seam allowance. Then I folded the seam allowance on the backing under to just cover the seam stitching and pressed it down. And this is the only thing I did differently than the tutorial - I hand stitched the seam down rather than stitching in the ditch as directed. I did that because the wool batting has so much loft, I was afraid I would end up with a very visible line down my quilt that was quilted everywhere else with swirls. Oh, and one last thing I did was lay the quilt across the rollers of my quilt frame, pin it to the leaders just to hold it in place, and quilt across the space that remained unquilted above the joining of the two halves. I had to shift it down a little bit at each end to get all the way to the edges of the quilt, but it's all good - it worked!
Then I located in my stash enough of this red stripe to make binding! Is there anything prettier than red stripe binding? And, as a friend on Instagram said, shouldn't all Christmas quilts have red stripe binding?
Every journey begins with a single stitch, right? More than four hundred inches around this quilt, so it took a while, but so worth it...
...because, isn't that the prettiest thing? And even more so because it's all finished!
