DECEMBER FMQ CHALLENGE

The last lesson in the FMQ challenge is by Patsy Thompson and it is on borders.  This is a really helpful lesson and the video is so good!  We had to practice 5 different borders on a whole cloth.  Below is my practice piece.  Each border  (which are kind of hard to see - sorry) is different and the first 2 from the middle out, are only 1/2" wide.  Then there are 2 one inch borders and the final feather border is 2".

Luckily, I had a quilt ready and it has 3 borders, so it was perfect to use some of the ideas for it.  The yellow and brown borders are each 1 1/2" wide and the final wide border is 4 1/2" wide.  Patsy's video covered the instructions on how to do a feathered border.  She is such a good teacher and it was pretty easy to do.

This picture shows the borders from a different angle as well as some of the blocks.  The center blocks are done in an overall pattern.

Here is a view of the overall pattern on the back.

Another view of the back.

This view of the front shows the yellow border a little better.  I used a variegated thread for the yellow and final border.  The rest of the quilting was done with Essential Pro in Cocoa.  I used Essential Pro Natural on the bottom.  I still have the long sides to quilt and when it is all quilted and bound I will take a picture of the whole quilt.

I am lacking two months of the challenge and I have decided not to make them up due to lack of time.  I do want to thank SewCalGal for hosting the challenge, and all the quilting experts that shared their expertise with us.  It has been a huge help to me.

NOVEMBER FREE MOTION QUILTING CHALLENGE AND MACHINE BINDING

I almost gave up on myself this month.  Yes, I almost didn't do my quilting challenge.  It has been a busy month and yesterday I was just plain tired.  

However, today is another day!  So I decided to do it.  I didn't practice as much as I should have.  I don't have any really imaginative quilting like some other people do, but I will say that I really appreciate sewcalgal for hosting the challenge all year.  And I appreciate the expert quilters, like Sarah Vedeler who were willing to share there expertise with us.  The tutorial definitely is helpful in giving us a great method to follow.   So, here are my samples.

In my last post I blogged about the two donation quilts that I finished.  I forgot to mention that I bound them by machine.  Pat Sloan has an excellent tutorial on how to do the machine binding and you can get to it here.  I pretty much followed the directions to a "T".  Except, when I went to put the binding onto the girl's quit, I sewed it to the front instead of the back.  So, since I had followed Pat's directions about ironing the binding down 1/4", I was able to still stitch the blanket stitch from the front while folding under the binding as I went.  Luckily, it turned out OK.  (I was too lazy to take out the stitching since I was over half way before I realized that I had sewn in on the wrong side).

Front view of girl's quilt.

Back view of girl's quilt.

This picture shows both the front view and back view of the boy's quilt.

Thanks for the tutorial, Pat.  It really saved me a lot of time and for a quilt that might get a lot of use, this binding will work fine.