A Quick Easy Quilt

Just before Christmas I ordered some of my fabric from Spoonflower and in the order was a yard of Big 5 Headboard Quilt I designed it so that it looks like a finished quilt top, so that all you have to do is put it together with Batting, Backing and Binding.

The fabric draped over our saloon table.

The batting I decided to use was a lovely thick fleece fabric. The backing I finally decided on after a lot of agonising was some beautiful Faux Suede and the binding I used was a lovely gold Silk.

Before I did any freehand quilting I stitched along the edges of each strip and square to get the three sections joined together. The first long stitched rows I did went along smoothly, but when I came to stitch across the quilt....I wished I had a 'walking foot' to stop the top being pulled and then puckering.. It was a learning curve to figure out how to stop that happening with an ordinary foot. But I kind of pushed the fabric towards the foot so that it pulled it through and so when I got to a cross piece of sewing there was no pucker...
Then I got to the scary /fun bit.. lol

Some free hand quilting.. My first attempt :^D 

On the gold batik crackle fabric I drew some trees and various animals, Giraffe, Ostrich, A hippo yawning, A termite mound, some more giraffe.. ha ha and then had to put my new as yet unused quilting foot onto the machine, take a deeeeep breath and start sewing... ha ha ha ha I had to unpick and unpick... It took me a bit of time to realise that it was up to me how long each stitch was going to be.. so now I have the fabric in an embroidery hoop.. to keep it nice and tight... and I have to move it at a certain pace and also try and control how fast the machine is sewing.. Oh BOY!
Lets just say.. I'll have to do a heck of a lot more quilts before I'm as good as the ones I've seen on shows... whew! LOL :-)

Some freehand quilting around the Lioness and her Cub.

This was interesting to do...
I went around the design that was originally stencilled over the batik crackle..
to enhance it.

This is a close up of where I quilted along the Ellie's trunk and around her eye. 

The Animals were a challenge too.. The Elephant may not look so good in this view but overall she looks great. :-)

A Shot of the back of the quilt where I quilted the Lioness and Cub.

The back of the Quilt with it's sleeve at the top so it can be hung if required.

The Sleeve is quite wide. I followed instructions that I found on the internet as to how to do it. The width of the sleeve allows the quilt to hang nicely without any bend or bulge or puckering at the top. I made the sleeve from the same silk I used for the binding.

All the corners ended up right.. yay!

The first time I did the binding.. yeah I had to unpick the whole thing..lol.. anyway the first time I did it, I sewed it onto the front intending to fold it over to the back and sew it down.. ha ha ha for some reason the corners just would not work  so i unpicked the whole lot and sewed it down on the back of the quilt, folding the fabric over to the front and sewing it down by hand. It worked perfectly... as you can see by the picture above. My Binding could have been tighter and so more..smooth.. but I wanted it this wide and so it's not as 'Full' because I didn't leave a enough edging sticking out to fill it up with.. I now know that if I want a one inch border or binding, I need to have at least two inches of stuffing, to make the binding nice and tight and full. Well that's what I figure anyway.

Previous to this quilt I always used to make small 1/2 inch bindings and so have never had this problem before. LOL..

The finished Quilt.

Hope you enjoyed reading this.
Cheers for now.
Sylvie.....xx