Sunday, May 6, 2007

Mt. Everest Continued


The quilt top measured 50" x 36", so I was able to cut a solid piece of black for the backing. I bought 100% cotton batting, then later discovered I liked the batting I had used before better (80% cotton, 20% polyester). For some reason, I was able to more easily free-motion quilt with the latter.

At any rate, I cut the batting and backing larger than the quilt top, laid the backing out on the floor, sprayed it with Sulky KK2000 spray, added the batting, resprayed, and laid the quilt top over it.
My back reminded me for several days afterward that I should have cleaned off my 8' workbench in the glass shop and used that to assemble the sandwich.
It was time to start quilting, and I started with long, vertical straight-stitch lines in the center panel. Then I tried free-motion stippling and meandering on the blue, green, and orange strips. I moved onto the "landscape border," then continued stippling and meandering on the dragonfly border. Finally, I free-motion quilted the black border. I didn't use a pattern, either to create the quilt top or to do the free-motion quilting.

The biggest mistake I made was while quilting the black border. The edge would flip under and I would accidently get it caught in the quilting. I would rip the stitches out and start over. You would think I would have learned after the first time this happened, but I made that mistake at least once on all four sides of the quilt.

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