etc.

Three. At least.

Thank you for your kind words about the quilt! I promised a post about quilting thoughts & lessons learned, so hopefully some of this will be helpful to you. I must admit though, this is as much for me as it is for you, because these are all things I need to commit to memory for my next quilting adventure!

• Quilting is my most favourite thing at the moment. Everything about it works for me — choosing the fabric, piecing the quilt top, arranging the blocks, hand-quilting, and even blindstitching the binding! I would marry quilting if I could.
• Notice how I didn’t include cutting out the templates and ironing (er, sorry, “pressing”) in that list? Yes, well, those are the caveats. Cutting out the templates was a major bore because when you’ve got your fabric all washed, ironed, and ready to go, the last thing you want to do is mess around with paper, scissors, cardstock, and glue. But when you’re working from a pattern, there’s no getting around it, is there? And then there’s the pressing. I learned that every time you stitch two pieces of fabric together, you must press the seams, regardless of how much you may detest ironing. I forced myself to do both the template-cutting and the ironing this time, and I’ll probably force myself to do it next time, too. While I can take my quilting lumps, I won’t do it without complaining.
• Once you’re done with the quilting, and once you’ve trimmed your quit and squared up the corners, it’s on to the binding. I followed the directions from Denyse Schmidt’s book down to the letter (the instructions are available here in PDF) and I took Kim’s advice and used the blindstitching technique described at the bottom of this page. All in all, I was completely delighted by the binding & blindstitching! I expected to be out of patience and ready-for-this-thing-to-be-done-already by that point, but I wasn’t, and hand-stitching the binding didn’t take as long as I thought it would (maybe 4 hours, total?). Of course, the process is a total treat when things fall nicely into place, and the quilt in front of you looks like the one in the pattern (my corners were in fact mitred and my stitches ended up being completely invisible!).
• You don’t have to understand every instruction to pull it off successfully & get your quilt to look like the one in the pattern. To wit: the instructions for mitred corners. If you’re familiar with the process, you know that when you’re sewing on the binding to the front of the quilt, when you get to a corner you have to fold your binding first to the right, then to the left, then pin in place. I followed those instructions totally on faith because I simply could not visualize how a couple of folds would get me a nice, square, mitred corner, but they did. Faith-based quilting!
• The one bit of instruction I didn’t follow? Drawing lines on the quilt top. Since I was working with a tight deadline, and since it took me 45 minutes to use my ruler and fabric pencil to dutifully draw parallel lines on the first block, I realized that something had to give (45 minutes x 25 blocks = more time than I had!). The grid pattern allowed me to pretty much eyeball the lines and while some aren’t completely parallel, they were parallel enough for me!

I will probably add to this post as I think of more. If you have any quilting tips or lessons learned, let us know in the comments!