FrankenWhiggish Rosebuds, Michele's Log Cabin Stars Quilt, Laundry Room Makeover, Swedish Pancakes + A 21st Birthday Celebration

Good Morning, Quilty Peeps!  As you can see by my way-too-long blog post title, I have lots of ground to cover today.  First things first, I am happy to report that I've finished prepping ALL of the remaining broderie perse rosebuds for my FrankenWhiggish Rose blocks, they are all glue-basted in position on the blocks, and the hand stitching to secure them is in progress.  That's right; I have a portable hand stitching project again FINALLY!

All FrankenWhiggish Rosebuds Are Prepped and Ready for Stitching!

In case anyone is interested in what's in my portable hand stitching "toolbox" for this project:

• YLI 100 wt silk thread in color 256, matched to the rosebud fabric
• Bohin size 12 Appliqué Needles (these are the only ones I've tried that don't bend or break on me)
• Colonial Needle Company Leather Thimble Pad stickers (I use one on my right pointer finger to help grab the needle and pull it through the fabric, or to protect my fingertip when I need to exert a little pressure on the back end of the needle to force it through a spot where the glue dried stiff)
• Thread Heaven (no longer available) or Thread Magic thread conditioner to help prevent snarling and knotting -- I don't need it when I'm using silk thread, but I have it in my hand stitching kit because it's a big help when I'm hand stitching quilt bindings with cotton thread
• My new 2.75 magnification sewing glasses from Warby Parker, so I can thread the eye of my needle and see how many threads of fabric I'm grabbing with each stitch
• That nail file in my kit is actually for my fingernails, because often I'll discover some little scratchy spot at the edge of a fingernail while stitching when the thread gets hung up on it
• Not pictured, I also have a tube of Neutrogena Hand Cream in my hand sewing kit and another one in the drawer next to my sewing machine.  I like this kind because it's not greasy, has no fragrance or dye, and a tiny drop goes a long way to just barely moisten my fingertips so I can get a better grip on what I'm stitching without gooking it up with lotion
• Either my Apliquick 4" Microserrated Scissors (pictured) or my Gingher Spring Action Thread Nippers (preferred if I'm just clipping thread and not trimming needle turn appliqué shapes while stitching).  If I'm planning to take my hand stitching kit on an airplane, I'll swap out for a cheap thread clipper (in case Airport Security confiscates it and throws it away) with a pack of dental floss that I could use as a backup thread trimmer in a pinch

(Those are affiliate links, by the way).   You probably won't see much of FrankenWhiggish for a couple weeks while I'm stitching the rosebuds to the blocks because, if you've seen one of my blocks get rosebuds, you've seen them all!  My Seven Sisters pattern and templates finally arrived from Australia and I'm planning to start on that project in September.

Instead of sharing FrankenWhiggish, I thought I might share some of the backlog of long arm quilting clients' quilts that I haven't posted about before, like Michele's version of Emily Dennis's Log Cabin Stars quilt.  Here's a teaser to whet your appetite; we'll return to this quilt later in today's blog post:

Michele's Log Cabin Stars Quilt, Pattern Available here

Aurifil 40/2 vs Forty3 Cotton Quilting Thread: Mary's My Happy Place, Ramona's Escher Connected + A Sneak Peek of Mary's Mid Century Mod Quilt

Good morning and welcome to the sultry, sweaty, swampy month of July!  Today I'm sharing two beautiful but very different quilts (and giving you a glimpse of a third gorgeous quilt) that were all quilted with "forty-weight" Aurifil cotton threads.  I'll be showing you the enormous difference between forty weight TWO-ply versus forty weight THREE-ply thread.  

When comparing two spools of thread that are labeled with the same weight but different ply, the 3-ply thread is a full 50% thicker than a 2-ply thread of the same exact weight.

There's a common misconception that if two cotton threads are both labeled "forty weight," they should be approximately the same thickness and should look and behave the same when stitched out.  In reality, that weight designation only refers to the weight and thickness of a single "ply" or strand of that thread, and the cotton threads we use for piecing and for quilting are typically either 2-ply (two strands twisted together) or 3-ply (three strands twisted together).  This explains why Aurifil's popular 50/2 cotton thread (the one on the orange spool) creates less bulky seams and performs better with smaller needles and sometimes different tension settings compared to 50 weight 3-ply threads such as Mettler, Gutermann, etc.  When comparing two spools of thread that are labeled with the same weight but different ply, the 3-ply thread is a full 50% thicker than a 2-ply thread of the same exact weight.  (This post contains affiliate links).

Aurifil 40/2 (Green Spool) Natural White Blends and Disappears Across Applique

In the photo above, I've quilted the Chantilly Lace E2E design across a client's appliqué sampler quilt using Aurifil's 40/2 cotton thread in Natural White.  This is their popular 2-ply forty weight thread that comes on a green spool and is widely available in quilt shops.  Although Aurifil 40/2 is a thicker, more pronounced thread than the Aurifil 50/2 that comes on orange spools (confusingly, bigger weight numbers indicate skinnier and finer individual strands or plies), 40/2 cotton is still what I consider a lightweight blender thread for long arm quilting.  Notice how the quilting stitches take on a greenish tint where this thread crosses green fabrics, but the thread seems to be a pale pink where it's stitched across the pink petal fabric.

Aurifil Forty3 Black Stands Out Dramatically, Even Against Busy Print Fabrics

In the photo above, I've quilted the Wishbone E2E design using Aurifil's Forty3 cotton thread in Black.  Aurifil has created this thread specifically for long arm quilters, it’s only available on giant yellow cones (not spools), and it’s not as widely available at quilt shops as their 50/2 (orange spool) and 40/2 (green spool) cotton threads.

I selected Aurifil Forty3 cotton thread for Ramona’s Escher Connected quilt because busy prints like these are notorious for rendering quilting designs all but invisible and we wanted a thread that would disappear against the black background fabric but show up more dramatically against the prints.  

Nanette's Globetrotting Quilt + My Newest Favorite Quilting Thread

 Hello, my lovelies!  Have you missed me?  I've been less motivated to write blog posts lately because I switched email subscriptions providers at the end of December (no more flying MailChimp monkeys) and still have not figured out how to get blog posts automatically sent via email with my service provider.  And knowing that the folks who subscribe to get my blog posts sent by email are the ones most interested in what I have to show and tell, and those people will most likely not be seeing the posts I'm writing now is discouraging!  (If a tree falls down on the Internet and no one is watching, does it still make a sound?). I hate wasting perfectly good quilting time on troubleshooting tech problems!!  But the upside to that is that I have been doing a lot of quilting while I've been sulking about my tech woes, so I do have a few things to share today.  

Nanette's Globetrotting Quilt with Aurifil Forty3

First, I have to share the gorgeous quilt I just finished long arm quilting for my client Nanette of Do It Right Quilter.  I used a new thread for the first time (well, new to me -- I think it's been out for about 5 years or so), Aurifil Forty3 long arm quilting cotton, and I am in love with it!

Detail of Feather Garden E2E Stitched in Aurifil Forty3 Light Robin's Egg

I wish I could capture in photos what I'm seeing in person.  First off, the color was an absolute perfect match to the lightest blue fabric in Nanette's quilt.  For this quilt, I wanted a thread that was simultaneously going to blend in like a chameleon to let Nanette's exquisite piecing and beautiful fabrics shine, but also needed that thread to have some presence so that we could actually see the elegant Feather Garden quilting design even though the thread was color-matched to "disappear" on this predominantly blue quilt.  Aurifil Forty3 is beefier than their 40 wt 2-ply thread that comes on green cones; Forty3 is a stronger 40 wt 3-ply thread that comes on big cones and is designed specifically for the demands of high speed long arm quilting machines.  The color saturation, luster of the thread, and its softness remind me of cotton embroidery floss, and I think it's this thread's softness that I like most of all, because of how it bends in and out of the quilt sandwich to form stitches that look more like a dashed line of tiny, perfect hand stitches than like machine quilting.  I mean, this is definitely machine quilting, but I kept doing double-takes and imagining that I was seeing hand quilting stitches coming out of my long arm.  

If you have a long arm and you want to give Aurifil Forty3 a try, you may have difficulty finding it locally but the Fat Quarter Shop stocks it here (this post contains affiliate links).  Just a word of warning: this thread kicked out more lint than any other thread I've quilted with, and I had to stop and clean the hook race and bobbin case out midway through every single bobbin in addition to cleaning thoroughly with every bobbin change.    For me personally, I am willing to deal with lint when the tradeoff is gorgeous stitches that make the quilting sing.

Nanette's Globetrotting Quilt, 62 x 62

But I am getting ahead of myself!  Back to Nanette's quilt!  This 62" x 62" beauty is a BOM (Block of the Month) design by Pat Sloan called Globetrotting, and as of this writing in 2023, the pattern is still available on Pat's website for FREE here.  Nanette started this quilt in March of 2014 and finished her quilt top in September of that year, and you can read about the changes she made to the pattern and how she used EQ7 software to preview her fabric choices on her blog in this post.   Shortly after completing this quilt top, which she'd originally planned to quilt herself, life threw Nanette and her husband some nasty curve balls that sapped a lot of her creative energy for big endeavors and she found more solace in piecing and appliqué than in quilting and finishing for the next few years.  This resulted in the accumulation of a LOT of gorgeous quilt tops needing quilting, more than Nanette felt like she could handle, so she shipped twelve of them to lucky me for long arming. 💕

Machine Piecing the Modern Baby Clam Shells Quilt, with Help from QNM

Hello, my lovelies!  My one and only weekly goal last week was to START -- just to start, not to finish, mind you! -- piecing my Modern Baby Clam Shells quilt.  I created the design in my EQ8 software in December of 2018, with a specific baby in mind whose due date was several weeks away...  Then it took me awhile to find the 9.5" acrylic clam shell templates I wanted to use (from an Australian Etsy seller who has since closed her shop).  Then I hemmed and hawed about the best way to cut out completely accurate 9.5" diameter circles (10" actually, since I needed a seam allowance).  After cutting out all the clam shells, circles, and partial clam shells, I then realized I didn't know how to sew them together!  I had my heart set on old school curved piecing, which I'd done for Lars's Drunkard's Path quilt eight years ago, but I wasn't sure how to go about piecing a clam shell quilt.  Do you start at the bottom and work your way up, or start at the top and work your way down?  Searching online, I either found instructions that confused me and explained only the part I already understood (how to sew a curved seam) and left out the part I didn't know (where to start and how to progress through the piecing of the quilt).  I also found patterns that subdivided the clam shells to simplify the piecing, or for using a prepared edge appliqué technique to avoid piecing altogether, neither of which interested me.  Ugh!  Annoying!  Set aside and ignored for a year and a half, until I made it my goal for THIS week:

So, as you can see, I've met that goal already because I did start the piecing!  Yay, me! 😉.  I'm using my Golidilocks machine for this -- my 5.5 mm Bernina 475QE, which is why I have my portable SewEzi table set up in my studio next to the big machine's cabinet.

So that's my quilt design rendering, created in EQ8 software.  It should finish at 40" x 40" unless I decide to enlarge it somehow.  There may or may not be embroidered butterflies before the top gets layered for piecing.

As you can see, I'm using a bazillion pins, because I want the smoothest, most accurate curve possible and I don't want to clip the seam allowances.  I prefer piecing with Patchwork Foot #37 on my little machine, and I bought a Bernina seam guide that I can snug right up against the side of my foot just like the seam guide that came with the #97D foot for my big 750QE machine.  Having that fence-like guide out in FRONT of the presser foot makes it so easy to to feed the curve smoothly with a deadly accurate 1/4" seam.  I'm also using my Patchwork Straight Stitch defaults (lower tension for my Aurifil 50/2 cotton thread and a shorter stitch length of 2.0).  On my 475QE it's stitch #1303, but the same exact stitch on my other Bernina is #1326 -- go figure!

Yay!  The first seam!!  As you can see, I started in the middle of my quilt.  Where should I add the next patch?  Let's put another clam shell onto the blue half circle!

Yay again!  Smooth round curves are making me happy!  This is awesome; why was I so afraid?!  Let's add a circle next!

But then I started second guessing how I was going about all of this and wondering if I was going to piece myself into some kind of a corner.  And I remembered an article I'd saved when I was going through a haul of ancient Quilters' Newsletter Magazines that a former member of the Charlotte Quilter's Guild gave me about a year ago.  (She wanted to donate them to a current member of the guild and I was the only person who raised my hand).  So I stopped piecing and (miraculously!) located the article, filed away in one of my ubiquitous 3-ring binders.

THIS!!  THIS is the information I'd been looking for, and I had to go all the way back to a March 1997 magazine to find it.  The instructions are for hand piecing, but all I really needed was that piecing diagram explaining that you start at the top, alternating between rows one and two, and then work your way down adding row by row beneath the first two.  That, the pressing direction for seam allowances, and the Fig. 6 photo showing that the seam allowances need to be kept open where two pointy clam shell sides meet up.  

Maybe I would have been fine if I'd kept working my way out from the middle of the quilt, but maybe there's a good reason for working top-down that would have caused frustration and swearing and, God forbid, seam ripping.  I'd rather not have to reinvent any wheels on this quilt that is already so far behind schedule, so I left off working on the middle rows and started working on the top and bottom rows instead, per the magazine instructions.

By the way, in the QNM illustrations they have cut out their clam shell using tag board templates to mark the seam lines and then adding 1/4" seam allowances beyond the drawn line.  That makes it easier for hand piecing, since you can check periodically as you're stitching to make sure your stitches are landing right on the seam line on the back of your work as well as on the front.  My acrylic clam shell template has small holes along the edges that I'm using with a Frixxion heat erase pen to mark alignment dots on my clam shells.  I know some people have had horrendous issues when they've used Frixxion pens to mark quilting designs on the front of quilts, with "ghost marks" left behind or the ink reappearing in certain situations, but I am just twirling the tip of the pen inside the hole to make tiny black dots on the WRONG side of my fabric.  They disappear pretty well when I iron them, and if they are not completely gone, well, they are on the wrong side of the fabric where no one can see them anyway!

So here you can see the completed bottom row of my quilt, all pieced and pressed!  I now know that a normal quilter would have used whole clam shells along the outside edge and trimmed after piecing, but it seems to be working just fine.  I think I planned for a 2" wide border in that same blue so the clam shells would float away from the binding. My top row is completely pieced now, too, in addition to that bit in the center that I'd already started before locating my instructions.  My plan now is to continue piecing down from the top and up from the bottom per the QNM instructions, joining the sections together at the center circles.

SO, having met my goal of STARTING the piecing this week, what are my quilting goals for the week to come?

This Week's Quilting Goals

• FINISH piecing Modern Baby Clam Shell Quilt!  
• Load next charity top on the long arm and decide how to quilt it
• Write next post for my Long Arm Linky party and schedule publication for Tuesday morning!

I'm linking up today's post with the following linky parties:

SATURDAY

·       UFO Busting at Tish in Wonderland

SUNDAY

·       Frédérique at Quilting Patchwork Appliqué

·       Oh Scrap! at Quilting Is More Fun Than Housework

·       Slow Stitching Sunday at Kathy's Quilts

MONDAY

·       Design Wall Monday at Small Quilts and Doll Quilts  

·       Monday Making at Love Laugh Quilt

TUESDAY

·       To-Do Tuesday at Home Sewn By Us

Slow Stitching Sunday: To Hell With Elmer's Glue All Over My Iron. Back to My Old-School Binding Methods

Because a Needle and Thread Feel Good, and Sticky Glue All Over a Hot Iron Feels Bad

Well, folks -- I had lofty intentions of binding this quilt entirely by machine yesterday using one or more of the glue basted binding tutorials that are floating around out there.  As you can see, I abandoned that adventure, carried my not-quite-finished quilt out to the deck, and started stitching the binding down to the back by hand with my trusty size 11 Bohin applique needle and Aurifil Mako 50/2 cotton thread.  *AHHHH!!*

Look How It Glows In the Late Afternoon Sun!

Can you hear the birdies chirping in the background?  I love how the colors glow in the late afternoon sunlight like a fiery sunset.  And I love letting my mind just empty while my fingers make tiny stitches on autopilot with no stress whatsoever.  Yes, it might take me 10 hours to sew the binding down all the way around this quilt, but I'd rather spend 10 hours relaxing than two hours of anxiety, burned fingers, and sticky glue all over the ironing board, which was what I experienced when I attempted to follow the "easy" methods of machine binding with Elmer's School Glue.

Green Spool Aurifil, 40 weight 2-ply, Stronger than Orange Spool 50 weight 2-ply

Updated 6/4/2018: Note to Self -- Don't use the 50/2 weight Aurifil for hand stitching binding next time!  It's too fine and it kept breaking.  The 40/2 weight Aurifil on the GREEN spools is a much better choice, or else a 50/3 cotton thread like Gutterman or Mettler would be a good choice.

Well, in all fairness, what I was really trying to do was my own mash-up of a couple of different machine binding tutorials.  I started with Hayley Grzych's Master Machine Binding tutorial from Bernina's We All Sew education blog.

My thinking was that I own the Bernina machine with the features and accessories used in this tutorial so I might as well take advantage of them, right?  So, as per this Bernina tutorial, I cut my binding strips 2 1/2" wide (rather than 2 1/8" or 2 1/4" as I've done in the past).  This was a mistake, as I'll explain in a moment.

Walking Foot #50, Needle +5 (All the Way to the Farthest Right Position)

Hayley's Bernina binding tutorial has you cut your strips 2 1/2" wide for a 3/8" finished binding, because that's the easiest binding width to eyeball with the Bernina walking foot.  As shown above, when the needle on a 9 mm Bernina machine like my 750QE is moved to the farthest right position (+5), the distance between the needle and the outside right edge of the walking foot will be 3/8".  With most batting, the 2 1/2" strip width, when folded in half and stitched to the front of a quilt, will be just the right width to wrap around the edge of the quilt and cover the stitching line sufficiently to be secured when you go back and stitch in the ditch by machine.  

Stitching Binding to Front of Quilt With Walking Foot and Seam Guide

I popped the seam guide that came with Patchwork Foot #97D onto my machine before stitching the binding to the front of my quilt for added "straight seam insurance."  Even with the glare of bright lights against shiny metal and middle-aged eyesight, the seam guide creates a barrier at the edge of the walking foot so that I'm sure of an even, exact 3/8" seam all the way around the quilt.

Sewing Binding to Front of Quilt

Hmmm, this binding strip is noticeably wider than what I'm used to!  I'm thinking that this must be because I need a little bit more binding on the backing side to ensure that the folded binding edge is secured to the back of the quilt when I stitch in the ditch on the right side, so I keep sewing it to my quilt, all the way around, carefully mitering the corners and joining the two loose ends with my little binding tool.  It looks great, smooth and pucker free all the way around thanks to my walking foot feeding all of those layers through the machine so evenly.  

Pressing the Binding Away From the Quilt Top

Then I take the quilt over to my ironing board to press the binding away from the quilt top.  Oh, how lovely...

Nice, Straight Binding!  Looking Good!

...Until I get to a seam intersection that was 1/4" away from the outer edge of the quilt top, and see that my perfect 3/8" binding seam has chopped off EVERY SINGLE POINT.  DUH!!!!!  

Buh-Bye, Triangle Points!

Exactly 1/8" Chopped Off Every Point

Every Precise Little Point Along the Top and Bottom Edges Is GONE.

If my quilt had a plain outer border, I could make my binding whatever width my heart desired from a scant 1/4" to an inch or more with no problems.  But when there is patchwork at the outer edge of the quilt with 1/4" seam allowances, the binding can ONLY be 1/4" wide without chopping off triangle points.  Oh, I could have left an eighth of an inch excess batting and backing beyond the quilt top edge to accommodate my wider binding, but I think it would be harder to keep that binding seam allowance straight and consistent all the way around the quilt if I was looking at fluffy, see-through batting next to my seam guide instead of the well-defined raw edge of the quilt top.  

I decided NOT to remove my binding, trim 1/8" off the width, and resew it.  It is what it is.

Now, Hayley's binding tutorial on the Bernina blog tells me to just wrap the folded binding edge around to the back of the quilt, make sure it covers the previous stitching line, and just pin it in place before stitching in the ditch from the front side of the quilt.  But when you put stick pins through thick, puffy quilt layers, you get a little wobble where each pin compressed the layers.  I didn't want to risk those wobbles.  So I decided to switch to one of the glue basted machine sewn binding tutorials at this point, the most famous being Sharon Schambers' painstaking technique for show quilts.  Sharon is an Elmer's School Glue junkie who even glues her binding to the FRONT of her quilt before doing any stitching at all, and then she glues the folded edge of her binding to the BACK of her quilt even if she is going to be finishing her binding by hand, heat setting the glue with a hot iron as she goes along.  And her finished bindings look AMAZING.

Well, I have never even pinned my binding to my quilts before I start sewing it on, and I have never had any problem with shifting or puckering.  I suspect that's because I'm always using my Bernina's Dual Feed and/or using a walking foot to ensure that my unpinned layers of fabrics and batting are all feeding through my machine without shifting.  Maybe the extra step of gluing would make a difference if I didn't have the options of using a walking foot or Dual Feed, and I'll certainly keep it in mind if I ever need to sew binding on with one of my vintage Featherweight machines, but for now, my motto is "If It Ain't Broke, We Ain't Gonna Try to Fix It."

But my friend Susan over at Quilt Fabrication has a great tutorial showing how, after sewing her binding to the front of her quilted placemats by machine the way I did on this quilt, she used Elmer's School Glue (heat set by ironing) to secure the folded edge of her binding on the back of her placemats before stitching in the ditch from the right side.  She said it was easy to do and her placemats came out great, so I decided to give it a try.

Machine Binding Sample

In the photos at left, you can see how I repurposed one of my tension testing scraps for practicing how I was going to glue baste the folded edge of my binding to the back of my quilt and then finish it by stitching in the ditch.  Since I have so many different colors along the outer edge of my quilt top, I threaded up my Bernina with invisible monofilament thread in the needle, leaving purple Aurifil Mako 50/2 cotton thread in the bobbin.  On the front of the quilt top, the needle stitches will land just INSIDE the edge of the binding, so the needle thread must match or camouflage with whatever fabric(s) are along the outer edges of the quilt itself.  Monofilament is perfect for disappearing on all of those different colors and prints.  But on the backing side of the quilt, the stitches are going right on top of the binding itself.  That's why the bobbin thread should be an exact match to the binding fabric.

I lowered my needle tension to 2.25 for the monofilament thread, and decided that I liked a stitch length of 2.25 as well.  As per the Bernina binding tutorial, I used Edge Stitch Foot #10D with Dual Feed engaged to stitch in the ditch from the front of the quilt, keeping my eye on the needle as I was stitching rather than watching the blade of the guide on the presser foot.  (I had a 75/11 Quilting needle in the machine and could have switched to a smaller size 60/8 needle with the monofilament to leave smaller holes in the fabric, but I didn't bother because I know the holes will close up when I launder the quilt anyway.  Also, occasionally I am lazy).  

I don't know; I think the sample looks pretty good, don't you?  I could live with that, for a completely machine sewn quilt binding.  So I grabbed my partially-bound quilt, headed over to the ironing board, and started trying to glue my binding down to the back side of my quilt.  And then my stress level -- and my blood pressure -- shot through the roof as I struggled with my obnoxiously puffy wool batting that refused to stay flattened long enough for me to glue the binding down and dry the glue with my iron.

Quilt Wars Episode 5: The Puffy Batting Strikes Back

See what I mean?  One of the things quilters love about wool batting is its puffiness, its resilient loft that doesn't go flat and limp between quilting stitches like an all-cotton batting.  But the downside is that the wool batting won't even flatten temporarily so I can get the binding glued down.  I've got glue all over my fingers, glue all over my iron, and I've been struggling with it for about 30 minutes with only about 10" of glued binding to show for myself, binding which is not even glued perfectly straight anyway.  

Then I remembered the 1/4" wide washaway fusible "Wonder Tape" that I use for securing knit garment hems in place prior to coverstitching them on my serger.  There are several brands of this stuff -- Dritz and Collins are the most commonly available.  They are like a very thin, double-sided sticky tape that fuses in place with ironing and completely washes out of the finished project when it's laundered.  Lightbulb moment!  I started putting it along the edge of my binding, although now that I'm thinking about it, it would be even better to apply the tape directly to the back of the quilt, right along the stitching line.

Washaway Fusible Tape for Mess-Free Glue Basting!

This alleviated my frustration with the sticky mess of the Elmer's School Glue.  However, the puffy batting edge was still giving me grief and the process was going SO slowly that I began to question how much time I was really saving with this "quick and easy machine binding" that I was trying to do.  Also -- and this was really the deciding factor -- the whole reason I was in my sewing room at all on Saturday afternoon is that I was taking a break from working on music for Sunday morning that was not going well at all and I was getting more and more freaked out as the hours ticked by and it wasn't getting better...  I decided some "fabric therapy" would help me to clear my mind of all the "ANXIE-TEA."  As it turns out, struggling with uncooperative puffy batting and repeatedly burning myself with a hot iron while I try to learn a new method of quilt binding was NOT the relaxing break that I needed!

Obviously, I survived my latest opportunity to make a fool of myself in church yesterday, because I'm still here to tell you about it.  And my quilt is still not done, because hand stitched binding takes forever.  I don't care; I'm recuperating today.

Monday Lisa and I Both Had Rough Weekends

I've not totally written off machine binding; I just wasn't up to it this weekend, for this quilt.  I think I need to experiment on smaller projects that are not already earmarked as special gifts, and remember that struggling to learn something new in the sewing room -- while valuable for growing skills -- is NOT relaxing and therapeutic in the way that hand stitching, chain piecing, and other previously mastered skills can be.  Taking a break from ONE challenging, stressful activity that isn't going well only to switch to ANOTHER challenging, stressful activity that isn't going well is a recipe for disaster!

Here are my takeaways from this aborted machine binding attempt:

1. Unless my quilt has a plain outer border, the binding width must be dictated by the 1/4" seam allowances along the outside edge of the quilt top.  That means binding strips are cut at either 2 1/8" for thinner cotton batting or 2 1/4" for a thicker, fluffier batting, and the binding gets sewn to the quilt with a 1/4" seam allowance!
2. Regardless of whether I'm going to finish the binding by hand or by machine, I need a 50 weight cotton thread that is an exact match to my binding fabric.  I had to make a separate trip back to my Bernina shop for the purple Aurifil thread because I didn't remember that when I was shopping for the binding fabric, and my stash of 50 weight cotton thread is primarily neutral blender colors that I use for piecing.
3. I should at least try using Wonder Clips (rather than glue or pins) to hold the binding in place for machine stitching.  The Wonder Clips have the advantage of less distortion where the 1 cm wide clamp compresses the fabric compared to pinning, and they also won't stab me or catch on the quilt, snagging the fabric as I'm wrestling with the big, bulky quilt under the sewing machine, and using the clips to secure the binding edge would be faster than any glue or fusible method.  
4. If, after trying the Wonder Clips, I'm still not happy with how the binding comes out, then using a fusible washaway Wonder Tape along the stitching line is probably the way to go over glue.  Not saying there's anything wrong with glue for those who use it successfully, but I was getting glue all over myself like I was a kindergartener struggling with arts and crafts -- I'm pretty sure I even had glue in my HAIR.  So, Wonder Tape is my friend.
5. As for the Dilemma of the Puffy Batting Edges:  I think that, if I was using a cotton batting or even an 80/20 cotton/poly blend, the batting at the edge of the quilt would have been easily smashed down into submission just with the iron.  Alternatively, I could have run a line of basting stitches right inside of the trimmed edge of the quilt to compress and secure the quilt layers before attempting to bind it.  Or I could have compressed and secured the edges of the quilt with my serger before binding it, the way I do with my Minky backed quilts before I apply prepackaged satin binding.  But again, the more additional steps involved with machine binding, the less attractive it is as an alternative to hand stitched binding.  Now I'm going to be basting, serging, pressing, gluing and fusing before I can even start stitching the binding down?  
6. One more thing I want to remember: Since I did glue down a good 12-14" of binding before I threw in the towel, I was able to discover that I do NOT like trying to push my needle through the stiff, glued fabric layers when I'm hand stitching binding!  Susan Schamber says she feels that Elmer's School Glue is basically like a starch product that helps to "stabilize" fabric for stitching, but I found the glue VERY difficult to stitch through.  Maybe I used more glue than she uses, and I'm sure it wouldn't pose a problem for the sewing machine, but for hand stitching binding, I have no problem wrapping the binding around the edge of the quilt as I go along, so the time I wasted spent gluing and fusing the binding edge in place was really a total waste.  Having the binding edge already sewn down all the way around the quilt would also make it difficult to hide the knots and thread tails when I'm hand stitching and need a new length of thread.

But for now, the binding of this quilt and any others will have to wait.  My kids get home from school soon and, before they burst through the door with their whooping and hollering, I need to review jazz music for tonight's VOX rehearsal.

Have a great week, everyone!