Corners

Recently, I tackled putting together some double axe head pieces, which promptly drove me crazy. In order to gain back some quilting sanity, I decided to just do a little project, as long as it was STRAIGHT SEAMS. I had seen several examples on other quilt blogs containing bright colors, including the binding. So I thought I'd go down that little path awhile, and just see what I could do. This was a very small project, but let's just say it stretched my horizons a fair bit!


First, I had this planning page:




Then I cut out various-colored squares:




I got the top pieced together:




Finally, today I finished the quilting, and this evening I bound it:




(I had a little mess-up, where I accidentally started to go around each square in one block like I was used to! That made me mad, so I put it away for a few days, then got back to it and took the stitches out and went on. I hate taking out stitches! Makes me think of Home Ec. class. ha ha)


A closeup, showing a little different quilting pattern in the squares:




New or rare things I did:


Quilted differently than around the edge of each piece.
Used colored quilting thread to outline just outside the blocks.
Used a bright print for the binding.
Sewed on a "continuous" binding, clear around with one (pieced) strip.
Worked with different binding corners than I'm used to.


In county fairs past, I've noticed judges look for "mitred corners." I've always accomplished this by sewing binding on opposite sides, then the other 2 sides, then folding the corners a certain way and stitching down to be nice and square from both front and back.


These corners I just did were a DISASTER! I thought I sewed the binding on correctly to achieve a certain kind of mitre, but it sure didn't. I'll have to figure out what happened. Here's a comparison of the "disaster corners" (red binding) and how I usually do it (dark blue binding):





There is another way you can do a quilt without binding. I bought a little Log Cabin quilt at a garage sale once. It was pieced and everything was sewn together on the edges with no binding (but it needed quilting). I thought it was very effective. So I quilted the quilt, and just used very simple quilting in the border area, following the seam. So here is a comparison of all three corners - the continuous disaster, the separate edge strips folded, and the no-binding style. Lesson learned! I'll stick with what works for me! Or at least figure out what I did wrong.