Quilt Along Wednesday

My Hearts and Feathers whole cloth is finished!!! I am very pleased with it. Blocking was a little more challenging than I thought it would be. In my haste and excitement to get finished, I forgot to measure before I soaked it in water:P OOPS!  I had already blocked it before I realized this, but I hadn't cut it yet. So, I decided to get it wet again, and re-block. This time, I tried to pull it tighter. I tried to stablize the center with pins, and then measure and pull out each side make it as even as possible on each side. Ummm, I was off a bit.

I didn't have any elastic, so I made due with what I had. I used a piece if foam poster board and cut it down to about a 1/2 in. bigger than the cloth. Then used binder clips to hold it. I was unsure of how the paper layer would hold up. It did fine, but the whole board buckled. I had a picture of this, but I lost my camera in my sewing room. I actually at this point, think the camera walked off. I searched high and low. It's gone. IPhone photos will have to do until I get a new camera. :(

I used biased binding. I have not had much luck with straight of grain binding.I didn't use as many pins as Leah, suggested for my binding. I just went slow, and it was fine.I LOVE putting the binding on!! I also put in a lable, and corner holders instead of a sleeve( I'm not sure what they are called, but I have seen them around the blogs.)

After the binding was attached, It was a little wavy on the edges. To fix this I used a squirt bottle of water to wet it. Then laid acrylic rulers on top of it, and put my acrylic extension table on top of it for a little weight. It did the trick. Not quite sure how I would fix a big quilt, though.

Question for Leah: If you forget to measure before soaking the quilt, is all lost. I couldn't seem to get past that, because if I measured from the outer feathers to cut, I wouldn't get a perfect square. If I measured from the center out, to get a square, the distance between the feathers and outer edge was not equal. I opted for the perfect square, since the distance was not to much off.

What I learned. Take your time with blocking and follow directions!! Accept that quilting/blockin/cutting cannot be perfectly accurate and jsut do the best you can;) And don't sweat the small stuff!!