Monday, February 18, 2013

Quilting and Binding the Underground Railroad Quilt

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.

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!)

No comments:

Post a Comment