Return of the Fleece Quilt

When we last met here, I was telling about making a quilt with one layer of fleece that works as both batt and backing. This is an ideal combination for any charity quilts or other utility quilts.
It's also possible to use basting spray, which certainly speeds up the quilting process.

And, of course, a supervisor is necessary for any project. Shayla is taking her Studio Cat duties seriously.

It can be difficult to decide how to quilt something, even a small basic item.

That's because there is no one right way to quilt anything!

Having quite a few 9-Patch related quilt tops, I figured out something I call Alternate Diagonals (not very catchy...) which, no doubt, as been thought up by hundreds of other quilters. It's all long lines, so you can leave to feed dogs up and let the machine make nice even stitches.

The darker blue sashing is the same width as the squares, so it is included in the plan. The border is too wide.

Just start at one corner and quilt a long line down through the squares, eye-balling from corner to corner.

Go back to the place you started, and skip over one square.

See the pink pin head? That's where you start the next line, and into the blue square. Skip the white one.

These pictures look straight on, but really you will be feeding the quilt into the machine with the whole thing at a diagonal.

The ruler here shows more of where the line goes, right across the sashing.

You could mark this if you wanted to, but with 2 1/2" squares it's easy to just sew/corner-to-corner.

Eventually you get all the way down one side with the starts of each line.

Then you rotate the quilt and sew lines corner-to corner in all the squares that don't have a line.

Instead of an X in each square, you get this:

OK...this is a Two Purpose Picture.

One to show how the lines cross.

The other is to show what happens when those 9-Patches are not made of real squares!

What do you think...if I'd kept a straight line, it would have missed the corners. Is this less noticable? I think in whole quilt it is.

This is your side of the win-win of charity quilts... working out these problems.

So as long as I was already lop-sided, I figured I'd go all the way with experimenting and do...

A fleece binding!

I even thought I'd turn the back to the front, since there was plenty of it! So I trimmed the extra to 3/4" away from the quilt's edge. That was a totally arbitrary measurement.
Well, it would have been better to do a separate binding, as I found out.
But that's what this blog is for...so I can make the mistakes before you do!
Who knew fleece has two straight grain edges, and two stretchy edges!?!?!
Oh, maybe you did.
Anyway, I just turned the edges over and zig-zagged them in place as I went along. I am a very lazy person.

Had I realized two edges would stretch, I would have controlled them by pinning before sewing. I'd start with a pin in the center of the side, then at the ends/ corners, and then halfway in between the first pins.

That would have kept the stretching between each pair of pins, not going all the way down the side!

The wide border just has two wavy lines of quilting going all around.

I told you I am lazy!

The quilt is done and ready to be part of my guild's donation to daniel (it's not capitalized), a foundation that does intake for all the foster children in this city.

Those are the last of my President's Blocks from sometime in the late 1990's. That's what being guild president does, uses up the brain cells and memory. The rest of the blocks are made into two other quilt tops...waiting to be quilted!