Time to add the backing!

Woot Woot!  I think this is one of the things that frightens people the most about quilting.  Surprisingly, it’s much simpler than I anticipated.  So jump on in and don’t be afraid.

Unfortunately, the fabric I had stashed for this project ended up being a little too small once I had everything put together (yes, I didn’t do enough pre-planning of my blocks…don’t judge.)

So, I measured out my finished top and headed to the fabric store (with the top in tow  – you know, just in case).  Found some yummy soft sweatshirt fabric after fondling some knits and fleeces and flannels…took it over the cutting counter…the nice lady cutting my fabric was kind enough to help me double check my measurements, and we were good…so back home for more sewing!

I did not use any batting because the backing material was pretty thick already.  Probably wouldn’t have, anyway, on this project.

I laid it out folded in quarters and squared everything up, trimming as little as possible…

Spread it way out on the floor, pressed it on the floor…made sure my top was good and pressed and ready to go –

Grabbed my basting spray and got started.

I started by folding the top over in the middle and sprayed and smoothed small sections from there, and then did the same thing on the other half.

Once basted, I used those fancy curved quilting pins (yep, they’re awesome – who would have thought such a simple little thing could be so life altering?  I probably put in way too many pins…but oh well…I pinned the heck out of it  – starting from the center and working my way out again.  I probably had a pin every 5-6 inches or so.

That’s it. done there. If you want, you could stitch baste by hand or machine around the edges a little just to hold things in place – I did not do this.

Moving on – gotta get some quilting done!

Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star…

To get this baby quilted, I started by straight stitching around the stars (through the top and back) that were already on the blocks.  That gave it a good hold, but not really quite enough quilting.  So, I called in my little elves to help me cut out some stars from scrap fabric.  This is where I used the templates  – I traced some of the stars from the blocks onto the template and cut those out.  The elves cut the stars from some left over t-shirt scraps. There were three of those little guys, but this is the most cooperative one that let me get a sort of decent picture.

The stars where sprayed with basting spray and pinned on where we thought they would work best and then I headed of to the sewing machine again – It was quite an adventure sewing around all of those little stars on my machine (no long arm…), but I managed to twist and roll and tuck and turn and get it done.  That’s about it! Not a ton of quilting, but enough…on the back, you can can just barely see an outline of the stars.  And they are very random, so I didn’t have spend a riduculous amount of time making sure everything was placed just so… Hard to see, but here are a couple of shots of that…

Side note – I have not at this point trimmed away the excess fabric from the back – you can do that if you want…I saved it for when I put the binding on just in case I needed a little wiggle room.

And, that’s it! All done with that…now we can move on to the binding….Next time!