wedding guestbook quilt

First of all, the giveway continues on through tomorrow night so head over and leave a comment if you haven’t yet to get your name in the hat. I’ve really enjoyed all the comments and new followers I have met this week!

Part 1 of the tutorial: here

Part 2 of the tutorial: here

Final Part: Backing and Quilting

I just did a basic strip piecing for the backing- cutting varying widths of fabrics and sewing them together until it was long enough for a backing
Because this turned out so big (King Size!) I spray basted the quilt and then just did an all-over stipple on my sewing machine.
I traced out the initials and the date with my fabric marker and then hand-embroidered through all layers with perle cotton using a basic embroidery stitch
Binding is machine sewn
And done! Yay! 🙂

Oh I wish you could see the happy dance that I am doing right now! I am so very, very happy to have this quilt finished. Part of me thought I could never get it done, but I was wrong- due in main part to the amazingness of my new Bernina. I never could have quilted this thing on my old Singer.

I have had the backing and top finished for a while and have been putting off quilting it because I was not sure how I was going to get the king-size quilt through a regular sewing machine. I am not going to say it was the easiest thing in the world but it was possible. I have a list of projects that need to be completed before baby comes and this was number one on the list so I just determined that this week would be the week that I finished it.

Monday, I spray basted the quilt (quite a job with a quilt this big!) and then added a few pins to give a little additional support. I spent Tuesday and Wednesday quilting both during nap time and at night. I think it took me a total of about 5 hours to machine quilt. I decided to stipple the quilt because I liked how it turned out on the last quilt I did, and, for me, it’s a lot faster than any other method. I’m not gonna lie- those middle sections of the quilt were tough! All that extra material bunched up in the harp space was a bit of a pain. However, all things considered, it was easier than I had anticipated it being. Then I did some hand quilting in the very middle of the quilt with the initials of the married couple and their wedding date. (Yeah notice how it’s almost exactly a year ago…lol).

Today it was binding time. I was way too tired at this point to even think about making 12 yards of bias tape myself. Thankfully, my local Hobby Lobby had exactly the amount I needed in a gray color almost perfectly matching the Kona gray in the quilt. I also decided to machine stitch the binding on for time and energy reasons. I used my walking foot for the first time and really like how it keeps the bias tape nice and even!

And now the grand ta-da…all finished at last! I really like how the finished project turned out. The stipple quilting is the perfect accent without taking away from the signatures. I would totally recommend doing this for a great wedding keepsake- just do better math that I did and don’t make it quite so large (It is almost exactly the size of my 8×10 rug!)! Sorry for the lack of amazing pictures. If someone has any great ideas of how to photograph a king size quilt feel free to pass that info on to me! Plus I am just too exhausted at this point to attempt a cool photoshoot. If you need me this weekend, I will most likely have my 36 week preggers body on the couch recovering from my quilting marathon!

I was so good at accomplishing my weekend to-do list! Got both sewing-related items checked off so now I have a finished quilt top to show you, finally!

Part 2 of the tutorial:

Gather all your blocks together.
Iron all the written-on blocks to set the ink into the fabric
Lay out on design wall or floor to decide on preferred layout. I interspersed the signed squares with blank squares and left a large block in the middle for the monogrammed portion of the quilt
Sew the squares into rows and then the rows to each other.
Part 3 of the tutorial (finishing steps) here

This quilt is queen size and boy is it huge! I didn’t quite realize how big queen-size would be when I set out to make it. I LOVE the way it turned out…exactly how I had pictured in my head. Good news is that my sis-in-law loves it too! My only concern now is how I am going to quilt it! I wanted to do some straight line quilting, but I am not quite sure how I will fit that humongous quilt under my machine?! Guess I will just jump in, give it a whirl, and see how it goes. However, I kinda doubt I will start on the quilting this week so I won’t quite worry about it yet. My goal this week (regarding this quilt) is to get it basted and all ready for quilting- meaning it’s time to find some fabric for the backing.

It was hard to take good pictures of this quilt because of its size. I needed a big ladder to stand on so I could get a straight-on shot but I only had a chair so you have to see it from a bit of an angle. Maybe I can tape it to the side of the house to get a full-on shot for later. It’s about 75/25 percent between the signed and unsigned blocks. The large, white, center square will be hand-quilted with the initials of the bride and groom as well as the wedding date. Part 1 of this tutorial can be found here.