Stringing Along: Quilting

Last week I posted about this string quilt. I finished the assembly and added a border. Why did I add a border? I think a border, while not always necessary for the design, is important for stabilizing the center of the quilt. All of these string blocks and the on-point setting made it pretty obvious to me that I would need to stabilize the quilt before loading onto the frame.

My favorite place to pick up wide backing fabric is Spring Water Designs. Every time I to they have something that just works with my quilt top. This backing was no exception. I embroidered the label directly onto the backing fabric before loading onto the quilting frame.

Not surprisingly, I found that this quilt was a little oversized but still fit onto my frame. I did buy batting for this project because I didn't want to have to piece batting. I generally buy batting by the roll so my limit (without piecing batting) is 90". This quilt is almost exactly 90" wide so that wasn't going to work.

I went nuts with the quilting. I quilted feathers, I echoed the feathers. I quilted swirls and echoed those. This quilt is full of several different quilting motifs and I love the overall effect.

I love playing with different designs. This is the back of the quilt so you can really see the quilting detail. I really need to make a quilt with some negative space and do some free-form quilting. quilting it over busy piecing doesn't give it a chance to shine.

Here it is all quilted. I still need to add the binding and get some good photographs of this one.

For those three people who follow my blog, I apologize for being late with the third post the week. I always mean to blog regularly but this week got sort of busy with after work social events, almost no craft time, and even less opportunity to sit down in front of my computer and write a post. I'll try to do better next week.

Do you make scrappy quilts? What about string quilts that use up those skinny leftovers?