Some stitching and a lot of unpicking

This weekend I finally got round to tackling two quilting techniques that I’ve been wanting to try for a while – making a quilt with knits and spiral quilting.

Earlier this year I won four fat eighths of Woodland knits in a giveaway by Forest Poppy and The Village Haberdashery and I thought they would be ideal for my first attempt at a knit quilt. I worked out a pattern in Excel (much more fun than my usual tasks in Excel) which optimised the quilt size and eliminated any need for seam matching. 

The pattern is based on Flemish Bond brickwork, using the Woodland knits for the “stretchers” and some squares of white knit for the “headers”. I’m still trying to sew from stash and the only white knit I had was a rarely worn T shirt that was due to head to a charity shop. Unfortunately this was much thinner than the Woodland knits and so I ended up using a double layer held together with some 505 spray! Continuing the “make-do” aspect of the quilt, I pieced together offcuts of fleece for the backing.

I initially chose to quilt using a blue 40 wt Aurifil (from the Simply Solids goody bag) but halfway through I was having doubts. I ignored these doubts and finished the quilting but it was obvious that the blue was the wrong choice. It overpowered the blocks and the white squares were lost. I decided to requilt with white 50 wt Aurifil and to save having to re tack the quilt, I initially unpicked just the centre and restarted the spiral so that the new white stitching was a few millimetres to the side of the blue stitching. It was worth all the unpicking as I'm much happier with the white quilting.

The binding was cut from a FQ from the Fly Away collection by Dashwood (also from the Simply Solids goody bag) which was an ideal match for the yellowy-green in the knits. When making the binding strip I wasn't concentrating and managed to piece all my bias seams so that I had mitred corners instead of a linear strip – time for yet more unpicking.

 

I’m pleased to have finally scratched the itch of wanting to sew a quilt with knits and try spiral quilting and I now have another quilt for Project Linus. The spiral binding quilting is great to use with a pieced quilt back as there is no worry about getting seams and quilting to align. I can see myself using spiral quilting on future quilts and maybe using the pattern again, but I think I will stick to woven fabrics for blocks.