MQG meeting, preparing for the quilt-in, and why I save scraps

We had a wonderful time at MQG meeting last evening. Lots to talk about! Stephanie has taken over the web presence for the group - yeah! She is working on a web page and linking up the members who have blogs. I am anxious to see what she had done. Thank goodness she is doing this. Our FB page is a disaster and maybe once she gets everything cleaned up we will get some new members!

After Stephanie sewed a snap on her coat that had come off, she showed us her latest quilt top commission. She is coming over to my house this weekend to pin baste it. It needs to be done for Christmas. I have a spool of 50 weight Aurifil that I think will be the right color for this quilt. 50 weight doesn't work well in my machine so I will be glad to have someone get some use out of it.

Next June showed the quilts she made for a newborn set of twins - a boy and a girl. The quilts turned out beautiful! June is still a newbie and she does a wonderful job with color choices and workmanship!

Joanna brought two wall hangings that she needed help choosing binding. This first piece looks like a landscape and has the threadwork/machine quilting to look like a river is running thru it. I love that red orange in this piece!

The other piece was this one made with beautiful pieced leaves.

I had brought my Moda Halloween quilt to show and to work on hand stitching the binding while we talked. I decided that I wanted to match the binding to some of the blocks after I wasn't totally thrilled with the way the binding looked on the orange and green Halloween quilt I made in September. Remember that one? What bugged me was the orange binding next to the green blocks.

So this is what I am doing for this quilt - call me crazy, but I am doing it anyway. I cut my binding from the fat quarters I had left. Then I butt joined them using a 5/8" seam. Stay with me now.

Then I flipped it so one of the seam allowances was sticking out while the binding and the other seam allowance went the other way. I trimmed the green seam allowance at an angle.

Then I flipped the binding around, exposed the orange seam allowance and trimmed it at an angle the opposite way from the green.

And this is what it looks like with the seam allowance press open. What this does is spreads out the bulk and then you don't get a big lump with a butt joint.

This is what is looks like with the binding sewn on the quilt.

The other thing I do when I sew on my binding is use a different colored thread in the bobbin so I can pick that row of stitching out easier when I am folding the binding over for hand stitching. If I use the same color as the backing it is hard to pick out which row of stitching I need to follow especially when there are multiple lines of parallel stitching. See my yellow stitching line?

I did get some binding hand stitched.

So now to the scraps. Well, since I decided to match the binding on the non-black or non-white background blocks I needed to cut binding for these three blocks on the other side of this quilt.

I had kept or at least I thought I had kept, all of my Moda Halloween fabrics together. I could not find the leftover FQ's for these three pieces. After searching and searching it came to me that I had used them in the two Halloween quilts I made in September. Ok now what? Scraps! What did I save? At first I found the selvages which I thought I would use in the label, but now they would have a different use. They were not wide enough to make binding out of though. Then I started digging thru some pieces from trimming and low and behold I think I will have enough once I sew the pieces together. Thank goodness I saved those scraps or I would be buying fabric today for the binding!

I am taking a vacation day on Friday so it will be as much quilting as possible starting when I get home from work tonight. I do have a hair appointment on Saturday morning, but I will use that time as my break and relax. I gathered some items that may come in handy for this marathon.

Have a great weekend!