Friday Finish

My Sajou quilt is done. Thank you Lori for such a fun Quilt Along.  I decided after much thought and consulting with my daughter (another quilter) that using the triangle pink for the binding would pull the eyes toward the edges and have one take in all the quilt, not just the center.

The  construction of the quilt gave me a bit of trouble, but from posts I have seen on blogs over the years, I was able to overcome them.

First off, once adding the last border, I saw that my outer edge had become wavy as the light pink triangle edges are on the bias and had stretched a bit. So I didn't think it was going to lay straight once I bound it.

Then I remembered a post a while back by Lynette at What a Hoot.  She had a large quilt which did the same. I remember her stitching around the outer edge of the quilt to try and take in the stretched fabric and make it more straight.

So that's what I did.  Setting my stitch length at  3 per inch instead of the 2 I normally use for piecing, I went all around the quilt. This longer stitch acted as if I was going to ruffle the edge. And it did, just enough to take in the stretched fabric. Click on the photo and it will get bigger so you can see the

stitch line and the gentle gathering above the green triangle. Phew, problem  solved.  Next I had to trim the backing and batting and get the edges ready for binding.  Oh, oh - as I laid my ruler on the first edge, I saw that I was going to lose most of my points of those print triangles because there wasn't  1/4"worth of seam allowance at those points. Drats.

Okay, I had enough batting around (just) to conquer the problem.  I laid my ruler with the 1/4" mark just at the points and cut off the excess from there. 

As you can see in the photo, my new edge became the batting not the quilt top.  When I sewed the binding on (using a stitch setting of 1.8 to make the seam strong), that new line was where I lined up the binding. Again, problem solved. I think I only lost a couple of points instead of most.

I'm linking to Can I Get a Whoop Whoop? and some others.  Blessings,