Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Tough Love

Some quilts are made to be loved. The really LUCKY quilts are destined for tough love. They'll be slept with, dragged all over heck, and get thrown in the washer on a regular basis. These are the quilts that get dirty, and get covered in dog or cat hair, get barfed on, spilled on and suffer all kinds of indignities in the name of love.

For quilts like this, I machine sew the binding in place on the front of the quilt. One of my pals asked what it looked like on the back.

Here are three of my quilts that have had the finish binding sewn on by machine. This photo shows the back. You can see my machine stitches. These quilts have also been washed many times.

My friend Mary made me laugh when she wrote this after seeing the picture above:

Gerald Roy may be wowed by the front of your quilt, but I'm wowed by the back. Anyone who can get machine stitching to march along evenly on both sides of a quilt has clearly established her bona fides.

Well, I HAVE bound over 310 quilts.

The tutorial is 98% complete. All that's left is a review of some formatting, making sure the text boxes, photographs, headers and footers are centered on the pages, and stuff like that. It's 60 pages chock full of information, including the stuff they never tell you, all in excruciating detail, and all with full color step by step photographs. It's been reviewed by my great editing team: Julie Sefton, Megan Fisher, Mary Lorimor and Allison Tom.

Oh geez. Now I have to write a description of it for Etsy...

3 comments:

Sandra said...

Like all of your loyal readers, I am always impressed by your work and how you go your own way. I notice you do not use a walking foot to attach the binding. So much I have read over the years suggests a walking foot for binding because of the layers. I trust the way you do things, so I would love to know your rationale.

Cynthia@wabi-sabi-quilts said...

Those are absolutely my favorite quilts too - they are the quilts that hold memories. I will look forward to your tutorial!

Monty Q. Kat said...

And the bestest quilts are the ones that the owners will not give up for an hour so that their moms can fix the holes. <3