Finishing Up Some Quilts!

I just LOVE my new sewing studio! ...and I really have been sewing every day between bocce, Mah Jongg, Hand & Foot, birding, dinner parties and going to the pool. Retirement is wonderful and living in this retirement community of On Top of the World is the BEST!

I just finished this quilt top for a dear friend back in Colorado. The squares are "Disappearing 4-Patch" which looks more complicated than it is.

This is the completed square. There are lots of tutorials for Disappearing 4-Patch (D4P) online so no reason for me to repeat the information here. One important thing I learned is that if you sew every square exactly the same way - all your seams will lock up perfectly with one seam going one way and the other seam going the opposite way. After completing the original 4-patch and making the four cuts, only the four rectangular two-material sections are turned.

My kitty-cat quilt just came back from the longarm quilter and I'm working on the binding. I like that it looks sorta folk art-ish.

This is the border (and my inspiration kitty-cat fabric) and a completed section of the binding. I made double-sided binding for this quilt.

It's blue on the back...

...and black on the front.

This is the binding sewn into place but before I turn it back and hand sew it.

There are lots of different instructions for this technique but I used 1 7/8 inch wide strips for the blue (back) and 1 inch strips for the black (front). I sewed the long strips together and ironed the 1/4 inch seam open before folding the long strip in half lengthwise and sewing to the edge of the quilt with a 1/4 inch seam. Some of the tutorials use wider strips and say to sew it with a 1/2 inch seam then cut off 1/4 inch around the entire quilt - but that's just plain silly and more work with no additional benefit!