Just in Case ...

Late last night, as I finished up quilting the charity quilt from the guild sew-in, I noticed that the dye in the donated dark blue backing fabric seemed to be crocking and turning my hands blue as I was trimming threads from the back of the quilt.

I will wash it today with a few dye magnets and fingers crossed, but I first pinned it onto the wall and took a few photos of the quilt and the quilting, just in case that suspicious fabric bleeds and ruins my scrappy kid's quilt.

My philosophy when it comes to quilting is that every quilt is practice for those that follow it ...

In this quilt, I was playing with a variation of my go-to big loopy feathers in the "lights," using a pastel multicolor variegated thread. In the "darks," I practiced some simple straight line ruler work, using another variegated thread that is darker/brighter. Both spools of thread were secret sister gifts at a retreat that happened far away and long ago–it was a good opportunity to use them up.

(You can see an even closer look at the good, bad and ugly of my quilting on Flickr here and here.) 

I mentioned in my Sunday post that, of all the ways you can make triangle squares, the method we used here was my least favorite because you end up with half-square triangle (HST) units that have bias edges on all four sides.  (You can read more about making HSTS in many way in my HST tip sheet).

For me, the stretchy bias wasn't too troublesome when I was putting together the top, but it definitely  did become an issue when I was layering/basting the quilt and later, as I was pushing it around to quilt it. Borders would have helped mitigate the stretchiness around the edges and I considered adding them, but realized that if I did, the quilt would be larger than the batting and backing fabric I'd been given to use for it.  

 If you've seen that YouTube video of the 4-at-once technique, you can see that it's a method that demos well and, has a cute gee-whiz factor ... though the fact that you are dealing with all those bias edges is never mentioned.  Your mileage may differ, but, for me,  this was the first and last time I'll ever make HST units this way ... or any other of those gee whiz block techniques that similarly end with blocks with bias edges.  I hope that washing the quilt will also help some of those stretchy bits will relax and shrink back to their original proportions.

I'm joining QuiltShopGal's #CreativeGoodness Linky Party.