Machine Binding My Donation Improv Baby Quilt from Maria Shell Workshop

Well, Hello September 21st -- Behold, my first quilt finish of 2026!  My last quilt finish was Halo in August of 2023.  Can I even call myself a quilter anymore?  Should I change the blog name to Rebecca Grace Sewcrastinating instead of Rebecca Grace Quilting?  Those are questions for another blog post on another day.  After church yesterday, I mustered up all of my gumption and managed to get this languishing unfinished workshop project completely bound and laundered, ready for donating.  Whew!

What looks like a striped fabric inserted between the coral and lime solids is actually an improvisationally pieced unit from a Zoom workshop I took with Maria Shell in September 2024.  I quilted it in January of 2025 and it's been folded up, shoved in a closet, packed up, moved, and shoved in a new closet in a new home until now.  

Improvisationally Pieced Baby Quilt, 38 7/8 x 41 3/4 After Laundering

Interesting math facts: This quilt top measured 42" x 45" initially, and it measured approximately 41" x 44" after I quilted it with this fairly dense design.  After laundering the quilt, it was down to 38 7/8" x 41 3/8", with a cumulative shrinkage rate of 7.4% in width and 8" in length from quilting and laundering combined.  The batting is Quilters Dream Bamboo and the quilting design is Color B2B by Anne Bright and the quilting thread is YLI 40 Tex Cotton in variegated Rio de Janeiro.  Although the quilt felt stiff and very flat immediately after quilting, it softened right up after washing, developing all of the crinkly, snuggly texture you want in a baby quilt.

Soft, Snuggly and Crinkly After Laundering Despite Heavy Quilting

I mention that because, when I was long arm quilting for hire, I would often have clients who were afraid that moderate to dense quilting designs would render their quilts "stiff as a board," especially with baby quilts, and that is just not the case unless you combine dense quilting with thick, wiry thread and a stiff batting.  We sometimes forget that, in addition to being decorative, quilting stitches perform the very important function of holding the entire quilt together and creating durability over the life of the quilt.  As I've seen in vintage quilt repairs, quilts that are very sparsely quilted or tied fall apart much more rapidly and severely than quilts that are heavily quilted, so I'll err on the side of overquilting a baby quilt rather than risk not quilting it enough to withstand accidents, spills, and hundreds of trips through the laundry machines.

Scrappy Celebrations is Quilted, Awaiting Binding

Well, whadda-ya-know -- Quilting a mediocre quilt top DOES make it better!  I finally managed to get my Scrappy Celebrations project quilted and I like it a lot better now.  I quilted it with Curly Feathers E2E, a nondirectional allover feather design that seemed a good fit for the soft colors and florals of the primarily Tilda fabric prints.  Even those blocks with the solid raspberry and aqua fabrics that felt out of place to me before seem to "belong" better now that they are quilted over with feathers.  Glad to have moved this stalled project from collection of unloved blocks to quilt top, and from quilt top to not-so-bad quilt.  I trimmed it after taking these photos, and I won't be labeling it since I'm planning to donate it, so just the binding remains.

53 1/2 x 62 Scrappy Celebrations with Curly Feathers E2E Quilting

One of the reasons it took me so long to quilt this is that I was determined to use up some of my many, MANY batting scraps rather than going the easy route and cutting new batting off the bolt.  I was determined to use up batting scraps, but not very motivated or excited to actually piece those scraps together...  I eventually dug out three long, skinny strips of what all seemed to be Quilters Dream Cotton Deluxe Loft batting, cut straight edges on them with my rotary cutter, and pieced them together with a 9 mm wide 3-step zigzag stitch and 50/2 cotton Aurifil thread.  So there are two batting seams running vertically through this quilt, and you cannot see or feel them at all now that it's quilted.  Waste not, want not, right?

Batting Joined with 9 mm 3-Step Zigzag Stitch

I chose the Curly Feathers quilting design because it's one of my few feather designs that is nondirectional, and I wanted to load this quilt sideways to speed up the quilting and to keep those batting seams parallel to the frame rollers so I could keep an eye on them as I was working my way through the quilting.