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.

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.