One of my goals this year was to finally finish quilting the Underground Railroad quilt. I started the quilt in October, 2011, and worked at piecing a couple blocks a month at first. While recuperating from knee surgery in the summer of 2012, I finished piecing all the blocks. All that was left was to quilt it. This is the quilt that made me say I don’t want to quilt any more big quilts on my regular sewing machine.
With sashing, this quilt comes out to 58” X 58”, so it’s not too big, but it was a bear to wrangle through the neck of my sewing machine. Most of the other large quilts I’ve done were all straight line quilting or free-motion quilted in a large stipple. Because this quilt is a sampler quilt, I wanted to quilt each block differently in a design to complement the piecing.
Even though most of the quilting is either outlining the patches or stitch-in-the ditch, I still had to change direction a lot and it just isn’t easy shoving that much quilt through my sewing machine. I did manage to get 6 of the 16 blocks quilted before my neck surgery last spring, but afterwards, I just couldn’t get back to it.
Even though most of the quilting is either outlining the patches or stitch-in-the ditch, I still had to change direction a lot and it just isn’t easy shoving that much quilt through my sewing machine. I did manage to get 6 of the 16 blocks quilted before my neck surgery last spring, but afterwards, I just couldn’t get back to it.
Since I had the three day weekend without any major commitments, I decided I was going to finish the quilting and get it bound this weekend. I’m happy to say I did it! Yay! My neck and shoulders are really aching, but the hard part is done! Now I just have to hand sew the binding to the back and add a label and it will finally be finished and ready to hang. (After I use the lint roller that is - I can't believe how much lint and stray thread shows up on the black sashing!)
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