Saline County Quilters Guild: Saturday Workshop

Fay taught our Saturday Workshop
which was held at the Herzfeld Memorial Library today. We worked on previously assembled quilt tops and learned how
to spray baste, straight-line quilt
and apply a binding.

Using a small 9-patch quilt that Sidney had made of 1inch squares, Fay demonstrated the steps.

1. Layer your quilt with the backing wrong side up,

then the batting, then the top, right side up to make a quilt sandwich:

2. Without disturbing the quilt sandwich too much, fold the top back on itself about half way, exposing the batting. Using your favorite spray basting product, spray only the batting. Smooth the top down over the sprayed batting and repeat with the other half of the top. (If you are working with a very large quilt, you may find it easier to work with only a fourth of the top at a time.) When you are finished spraying, smooth the top down over the batting and make sure it is adhering nicely.

3. Then flip the quilt sandwich over and repeat the process with the back side of the quilt.

4. Now you are ready to quilt. Fay recommends selecting a decorative stitch and quilting in straight lines. Not only will you be able to get your quilt finished more quickly, but the decorative stitching will add interest.

She decided to do all of her quilting in the sashing on this little quilt. The decorative stitch made a pleasing secondary pattern.

Below is a close up where you can get a better look at the stitching in the sashing.

Fay then trimmed her quilt:

and applied the binding:

She stitched the binding to the back of the quilt so that it could be brought to the front and stitched by machine with a decorative stitch. When she uses this method of applying a binding, she never uses a straight stitch on top. It is hard to keep straight stitching exactly on the very edge of the binding. Using a small zig zag stitch on this particular binding added to the overall design and was very pleasing.

Helen worked on a quilt made of tumblers. When she was finished quilting, Fay showed us how to trim the edge of the quilt so that it would have a straight edge instead of a zig zag:

You can see that just a little bit of each tumbler along the edge is being trimmed off. Helen used a decorative stitch along the outer edge of each row of tumblers. As a result, it appears that the stitching has been done around each tumbler. It is hard to see it but you can trust me--it's there.

Marge got this one quilted during the class. She was going to take it home and finish quilting the borders.

There were several different quilts that had been made using our bingo blocks. Marge put most of these bingo block quilts together so she hopes we don't play bingo again for a while!!