Quilting Update

I finished quilting both Diagonal Puzzle and Life's Ups and Downs, so they are ready to turn in at our Project Linus meeting tomorrow.

Diagonal Puzzle Quilt

On Diagonal Puzzle, I ditch quilted the edge to edge seams between the horizontal rows of blocks. Then I quilted zig-zag lines from top to bottom, first going through the center of the black squares on one row, then zagging at a right angle across the solid block on the next row arriving at a black square corner and turning again.

Once all the zig-zags were quilted through the black squares, I used a chalk pencil to mark half way between the points of the zig-zags and quilted a set of zig-zags through those points so the stitching was close enough to hold the batting securely. You can see that better in the close up picture below.

Life's Ups and Downs Quilt

On Life's Ups and Downs, I first ditch quilted some of the vertical seams to stabilize the quilt. My goal was to have the vertical stitching about 5" to 6" apart, but I had to work with the width of the pieced strips.

With the quilt stabilized by the vertical stitching, I quilted horizontal waves across the quilt. First I stitched waves through the yellow lizard print and the 2 waves of continuous green (the only 3 fabrics forming an unbroken wave). With those lines as a rough guide, I quilted more waves to divide the area and leave no spot more than 4" from a line of quilting. A closer view is below.

I used Pellon Quilter's Touch polyester batting in these quilts. I bought a 60" wide by 20 yard long roll at JoAnns when it was a door buster special on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. It is a nice batting to work with. Definitely better than the 10 yard rolls of polyester batting that JoAnns sells.