Quilt Progress

 I am looking after mum following a fall in which she broke her ankle and two bones in her leg.  So  I have not been  sewing as much as normal and there has been only a little knitting happening.   The Monkey a Month knitting challenge has fallen by the wayside rather.  I am about half way through the second clue for the shawl but it is not TV knitting so its been slow progress.  The Style Arc patterns I was working on are also on hold as I've not had time to work on those either.

I am on leave from work this week though, so I have been working on my quilt in between other things and now have all the strips assembled and ready to quilt. There are four strips in total.  Three have one strip of vertical sashing included whilst the fourth strip has two vertical sashes, so is slightly wider.

You can see one of the narrower strips here.  The blocks were sewn together with the horizontal sashing between each square plus one at the top and the bottom.  The vertical sash was then attached to the correct side of the strip.  After pressing, each strip was laid on the wadding which was then cut to the same size as the pieced strip.Finally, a strip of backing was cut using the same method but cut a bit bigger because it will probably pull in slightly when the top is quilted. Also, it gives a little extra seam allowance to play with at the last stage of the process, which is the bit I'm a bit nervous about.

The pieced strip is placed face down, then the wadding smoothed out on top.  I then peeled it back and sprayed the back of the pieced strip with 505 temporary adhesive to keep the layers together,  smoothed it all out so both sides were totally straight and there were no wrinkles anywhere, then pinned it heavily with safety pins.

Next, the backing was laid down smoothly and the wadding/pieced unit laid on top, smoothed out, then peeled back, sprayed with the 505 and then smoothed back into place.  Finally, the sandwich  of layers was tacked together.  One strip was very disobedient and this one was tacked and re-tacked twice before I gave up and pinned it all together with  hundreds of safety pins... I think this will work OK as its pretty well anchored down.  Also, I'm keen to see if its a practical alternative to all that tacking, which has taken me the best part of two days to do.

And now the units are ready to quilt.  :)

I plan to quilt in the ditch around all the inner squares first.  This should permanently anchor the strips so they are nice and firm and when I come to start turning the strips around and  around under the machine, hopefully they won't shift, or wrinkle.  There are thirteen squares to be quilted on the machine, and seven will be hand quilted.  I'm using Warm and Natural wadding mainly, with some Warm and White mixed in.  I've actually cobbled the strips together from leftovers from other quilts as I had a big bag of these bits. I just cut them to the right width and made sure they were straight edged, then butted the edges up, shoved them under the machine foot, and whizzed along with a wide zigzag stitch to hold them together.  This particular wadding can be quilted as far apart as six inches I believe so I don't need to quilt the squares particularly heavily.  Unless I want to.