Tribal Quilting & Binding

Last night I attended my local guild meeting and as you may remember from a previous post I always take at least one quilt for show-n-tell.  Last night I wanted to take two.  One of them I can’t show you yet.. sorry.  The other is the quilt I showed you how to make HERE.  Remember, I used my AccuQuilt GO! to cut the 6 1/2″ Tumbler blocks and whipped it up in a few hours? Love it.

I wanted to do a simple all over quilting design that would compliment the very geometric, tribal-like motifs in the fabric.  This is what I came up with.

Well, not that it took any planning or designing.  I just started free-handing it directly on the quilt. I love experimenting with new random quilting designs.  It definitely helps when the quilt I’m experimenting on is not for a customer. This one is for my 13 month-old son.

I’m very pleased with the way it turned out.  It’s swirls with triangular peaks throughout in no set pattern.

Surprisingly my favorite part of the quilt is the backing. I cut out my binding strips before quilting it and mistakenly ended up with a little less backing than I needed.  So, I pieced the backing with a strip of solid red and I love it!  It allows the quilting to POP! right at you in that one strip.

I also tried out a new binding technique on this quilt.  I always machine stitch my single fold binding to the front of the quilt and then hand stitch it on the back.  I used to use an invisible/ladder stitch like the one posted at Dream Weaver’s Quilts and found that although it is invisible sometimes I would end up with little gaps no matter how tightly I pull the thread. That I didn’t like. So, I remember seeing binding on some quilts that had very teeny-tiny stitches that you could barely see and so after trying a few different experimental stitches I think I got it.  This is my new way of hand stitching my binding. I really like it!  You can see small dots of thread but I feel like it holds it down better because the thread is coming off in the direction that pushes the binding into the backing keeping it nice and taught.

 

How do you attach your quilt binding?

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