Ooh… Another Quilt Top Finished!

I sewed the final seam on my Kaffe crumb quilt tonight. Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to take photos yet. I’m hoping to get photos tomorrow evening and do a blog post as well. I’m so happy that I’m finally motivated to sew again. And, man, am I getting stuff done!!!

I really don’t love the final steps in completing a quilt. All that bulk is difficult to manage and maintain a nice 1/4 inch seam. So I’ve come up with a few tricks over time that make It a little easier for me.

I sew the rows together in sets so I’m not always dealing with a maximum of bulk. So for this quilt I sewed four sets of two rows each. Then I sewed those four sets into two larger sets, and then sewed the final two sets (each one-half of the quilt) together.

When sewing these long rows together I do a lot of pinning. I pin the seams with a pin along the seam lines. Then I pin sideways to keep the fabrics from slipping so I can maintain a nice, consistent 1/4 inch seam on both the top and bottom fabrics. I take multiple bites with each of these long flower pins.

This photo shows the pins going in different directions.  One along each seam line and the rest running parallel to the seam I’ll be sewing.

Once the seam is all pinned, I sort of fold and roll the quilt onto itself so that it’s around a foot wide, leaving the portion to be sewn extending from the roll of fabric. The pinned seam in this photo is toward the wall.

The photo above shows the quilt pinned along the horizontal center seam, and then rolled/folded back onto itself to make a nice, compact roll.

Then I accordion fold this roll so it’s in a nice compact stack, ready for me to feed into my sewing machine.

I put this stack on my lap and feed it into the machine. I go slow and stop a lot to move and adjust the bulk of fabric as it feeds through the machine. You definitely want to stop with your needle down when sewing these long seams.

So now it’s all sewn and pressed and laid out on my cutting table. I can’t stop looking at it! It’s probably my favorite quilt of any that I’ve made. I can’t wait to have good photos to share!

Someone on Facebook suggested that a good time to take photos of your quilt outdoors is after the sun goes down but before it gets dark. I tried that tonight with my scrappy hexagon quilt and this resulting photo is the only one I’ve ever been able to take that actually looks like  this quilt does in person.

I took a few test photos of one half of my crumb quilt tonight and they turned out soooo good! I can’t wait to share it here!