The winters in Western PA are long and dreary. I know many of you probably roll your eyes and think "HA! where I live it is much worse!" but for me, a Georgia born girl, after years of living here, I still am not used to these grey and brown days. Thankfully, we do usually get a couple of days where spring peeks out and says hello before winter comes back again. The snow melts, the grass shows, and the sky is bright blue. Today and yesterday we had those days and I felt so happy! We played at the park and rode bikes in the driveway. I took 2 walks OUTSIDE yesterday. Yesterday I also finished up this little quilt and now it is officially called the Sunshine Quilt.
Isn't it so sunny and fresh? I did the same thing as when I made this pink quilt. I used my scrap bag of yellows to create this mix of fabrics just like I did with the pinks.
My girls are not as impressed with the yellow (since it's not pink or purple) but I am in love. I think I am going to make some really bright yellow throw pillows to get me through the rest of winter. Awesome idea.
Along with the color, I also changed the way I did the binding. I love the look of the hand stitched binding but I am not a "sit down and relax with hand sewing" type of person. I don't know why I can't get into but I usually just feel frustrated and ready to be done.
I think the binding turned out nice. Not as nice as the one I did the traditional way, but still really nice. I saw this post on Prudent Baby and emailed those gals about how it was done. They said you make your batting a 1/4" bigger all around the quilt and then make your backing about an inch bigger all around. Then, you just fold it over and miter the corners.
The only thing that didn't work great was the actual quilting. I did it before I did the binding and made the usual backstitch at the beginning of my lines of quilting. Next time, I will quilt first again, but then not do the back stitch so that I can easily go around with a seam ripper and fix those little lines that came over my line from the binding. Hope that makes sense!
I used a solid yellow flannel that I bought at this etsy shop. It's fine I guess. I thought it would be really nice and better than JoAnn's but it is about the same. The flannel did really well to fold up over and laid nice and flat. So this took me a fraction of the time and I like it for a baby quilt made from my yellow scraps. I can easily give it away or sell it at my show in April without feeling like I put so much time into it.
But don't worry you true quilters out there~ if I ever make a quilt for myself, I will use the traditional hand binding beautiful method without complaint and it will be wonderful! Hope the sun was shining for you today too.
