Design Wall Monday 1/10

Still working on my yellow monochromatic challenge.  Here are the 4 inchers sewn together.  Now I have to get batting and backing ready so I can start assembly.

Limited quilting time this week - have lots to do with DGKs, but that's life.  If I get my 15 a day in, I'll be happy.

What's on your design wall?  Go over the Judy's Patchworktimes to see what others are doing.(on left sidebar)

Stash Report 1/9

Going through my stash and I've donated 2 yards of pieces to our Thrifty Quilting Corner at my Guild.  They resell quilting and sewing items with monies going to fill our Happy Bag for Cancer patients.  I used a 1/4 yd for binding for UFO #6 (yeah, it's done!) and pulled 1/4 yd of fabric for a block I am going to play with.

So:  Used/Donated this week:       2.5 yards


Used/Donated Yr to date:             4.0 yards

I bought one yard at LQS friday - actually I only needed a 1/2 yd for my block project, but they wouldn't let me pay with a credit card for a $4.96 purchase, so I had to buy another half yard to make the sale reach the CC minimum.  Talk about poor customer service.  I'd go elsewhere, but it's the only quilt shop in town.

Added this wk:                         - 1.0 yards

Total Yr to date added:            -1.25 yards

-------------------------------------------

Total Used Yr to date               2.75yards

Progress Report: Greening of the Batt

I've designed and gotten the blocks for the yellow monochromatic challenge assembled.

I've quilted and made the binding for UFO # 6 - and hope by monday to have that done.  To get there I had to come up with batting for the 36" quilt and I did it by salvaging(aka as greening, lol) some batting from my batt bag.  I'll never understand why batting companies can't come up with more usable sizes of batting than what they sell(52 x 64 would be my preferred size - what's yours?), but then I guess it would be too hard to come up with all the sizes we need.  So I usually have strips of batting left over which I save.  I'm sure you must too cuz we're always saving scraps of fabric, aren't we?

So I went through the bag and pulled out batt strips of the same kind of batting and laid them out on the floor.  I had 3 strips and one small square of fabric which when laid out gave me a 38" overall square.  Taking these to my cutting table I added the square to one strip to make it long enough.  I learned this method from Marti Michell in her book:  Machine Quilting in Sections  It's a great book. So first I overlapped the two sections I wanted to join, and with my rotary cutter cut a wavy line in the center of the overlap.

Here's what they look like separated. 

Throw away the bits left over from the cut overlap and fit the two piece together again.

Now I take a strip of fusible interfacing and lay it over the cut.

Here I'm showing you the piece longer than the batting but that is just to show the interfacing.  When I iron it on, the top edge meets the top edge of the batting and the bottom edge is trimmed to the bottom edge, and one can hardly see it.  Now I have a piece long enough to use for my 38" batting square.  I attached the strips to the larger rectangle in the same way, and I had my batting for my ufo sandwich.

I know others just line up the two sections and zigzag them together, but the edges are never straight enough and I got bumps here and there and with hi loft batting the zigzag stitch tended to flatten the batting at the seam.  This way one can't even tell where the joints are.