>Blogger’s Quilt Festival: Whirlygigs!

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I’m back after a long (almost two weeks!) absence. I’ve been trucking away on my Whirlygigs. I finished the quilting during the Friday Night Sew-In but didn’t post Saturday, because I wanted to show the finished product, so here it is!

This is my quilt for Amy’s Blogger’s Quilt Festival. This quilt is special to me because I made it just for me! It’s the perfect sitting on the couch quilt, and it’s a fun design I had been wanting to try out. I started this quilt about two months ago, and it sat on a shelf for a long time while I was distracted with other projects. One of the main reason this project was shelved for so long is that I was rather frustrated when I failed to include the seam allowance in the width of the strips I cut for the sashing. Rather than toss the strips and start over, I decided to run with it, and I’m so happy with how it turned out! I think “fudging it” is part of the beauty of quilting, you can break the so-called rules and still wind up with a fantastic finished product!

I especially like the back of this quilt. I used my few remaining charm squares to make some 4″ square whirlygigs (the ones on the front are 8″ square) and bordered them in ½” of the pink Minny Miu border print. All it needs now is a label…

I also learned that straight-line quilting is sooooo much quicker and less stressful! I used a programmed stitch on my machine through the center of the sashing. Then I just stitched straight lines a quarter inch away from the outlines of my whirlygigs to make them pop a little.

The biggest achievement for me, though, was the binding. I’ve been wanting to do a striped bias binding for a while, so I found some pretty yellow 100% seersucker at Jo-Ann. The achievement is that this is my first quilt with hand-stitched binding! I finally broke down and gave it a shot. I used Amy’s fabulous tutorial, and it didn’t take nearly as long as I thought. My favorite part about hand-stitching the binding is that I can include some extra batting in there (I trimmed a half inch away from the stitching instead of a quarter), so the binding is nice and puffy, not flat.

I’ve really enjoyed reading the posts so far in the Blogger’s Quilt Festival, and can’t wait to read more. As I write this, there are more than 500 participants! Please click the button up top and check them out!