19th quilt done for 2012

Well i got the LLVL (Livin' La Vita Loca) quilt done on Saturday. Once I hung it on the pipe hanger in my living room (under construction still!) I said to myself - I am sure glad I now have a design wall, because this quilt would not have ended up looking like this! It is just plain off balanced! Well, at least it is done and I will just end up sticking it in the closet anyway. I like the back though. I hand dyed the purple and yellow fabrics. I used COnnecting Threads Essentials color Cornsilk for the main part of the quilt in both the top and botton threads and each of the centers is Sulky rayon on the top and a cotton for the bobbin.

I started on the step zig zag quilt on Saturday afternoon. Here is a blow by blow of my construction for any of readers that would be interested.
I cut 3" strips of fabric the width of the yardage - two strips of each color except for the black car print which I cut about 5 or 6 strips. I joined them with 3" strips of Kona snow using a 1/2" seam. I chained pieced the strips. I had also cut the strips in half so I was only dealing with 22" long pieces instead of 44". Before you do this read on and I will explain how I turned a mistake into a positive.

Next I pressed one of the strips pressing the seam allowance to the dark side.

I then took the next strip, layed the seam allowance next to the previous strip seam line, press it, then flipped the dark fabric of the second strip on top of the first strip and pressed it flat.

Here are three strips pressed and stacked. I do this to line up the strips for cutting. There is no way I am going to cut my patches one strip at a time. That would just take too long! I usually stagger stack 4 strips at a time.

Now I trim off one end of the strips.

Cut the patches at 5 1/2". Save the end cuts that are less than 5 1/2"

Repeat until you have all the patches cut and arrange on the design wall. I did have to make a couple more blocks that I was short on. See the three odd red ones at the bottom? I couldn't find anymore of the red I used for the other blocks. See I am not one for figuring out exactly what I need. I just cut what I think I might need and start sewing.

Sew the rows together.

SInce this quilt is for a 6 or 7 year old and the zig zag part is only 40" x 50" I decided to add a border to make it a bit larger. I cut 5" strips and added the borders at the side first.

I pressed the side borders open and then I added the borders at the top and bottom. I didn't trim the excess until after I sewed the border on.

After pressing the top and bottom borders open, I trimmed the corners.

Remember all those end cuts I saved? Well, I didn't want to waste the fabric so I pieced them together to use on the back.

The pieced accent strip wasn't quite long enought so I added a piece of plain fabric at each end.

I found a couple of scraps in my backing pile that were big enough for the backing. Here I layed down the quilt top and was laying different pieces of backing on top until I found pieces that were big enough. Again, I not much for measuring so I just lay things out until I find what works.

After sewing and pressing, I taped the backing down to my table. I pulled out my pile of batting scraps and layed pieces out until I found enought that would cover the backing. Here is the batting all pieced together layed out on the backing. I free style double cut the batting with my rotary cutter and used a wide zig zag stitch to sew the pieces together. I just butted the pieces together - no overlap - and the zig zag stitch I used takes 3 stitches for each zig zag line. If you use a regular zigzag stitch sometime you will get more of a ridge. If I didn't have the multiple stitch zig zag, I would make my zig zag stitch narrower so the batting doesn't bunch up into a ridge.

Here is the quilt all pin basted and the binding is ready to go. I sewed all my strips of binding together - something I normally don't do, but I think I am going to have just enough binding so I need to used every inch. I will just have to make sure that my seam lines where I joined my binding strips don't end up too close to the corners or it would be hard to do my sewn mitered corners.