Christmas lattice Quilt. Part 7.

I’m finished the Christmas quilt. This will be a long post as there were quite a few small but fiddly steps so I’ll include them all here.

I finally managed to finish the FMQ on the border. It went much better than before and even though I wasn’t 100% happy with the results (when am I ever?) I can live with it. I then sewed on the binding.

I wanted to do a quilt label that matched the theme of the quilt. This is probably something I’ll try to do for each of them. For this quilt I planned to do the label in a pale cream fabric with a border in the backing fabric. I wanted the border to blend into the quilt as my plan was to appliqué gold stars onto it. I have ever done appliqué before so more on that later.

First I cut out the label pieces.

I then sewed the border pieces to the label.

Then came the applique part. As always I read up about it and looked at the different methods. The one that looked the easiest was where you iron interfacing to the shape then machine stitch around the edge. That didn’t appeal to me as much though as the photos of examples looked a little clumsy and as I knew I wasn’t going to be great at it I didn’t want to have clumsy as my aim. So I decided to do the technique where you cut out the shape in freezer paper and iron it to the wrong side of the fabric.

From what I read it was advised to leave a ¼ inch seam allowance but when I did this it was too fiddly for me to manage so I cut a larger seam allowance. Hopefully I’ll improve with practice.

There are then differing ways to tackle the next step. Some people trace the line of the shape onto the fabric then either finger press, or just turn with the needle, and sew to the background fabric. I tried this but again it was too tricky for my novice ability. I preferred the method whereby you press the edges over to have a cleanly defined line.

I then sewed the stars to the label with small stitches. I love this! I’m definitely going to do more appliqué. It’s just the right amount of hand stitching for me. Something I can do while watching the TV or on the go.

I wrote my label and made a mistake. I spelled Christmas wrong (Christmass L). In my defence I was tired. I also started sewing it to the quilt back and it was wonky so I left it and went to bed. This morning I had another go and transformed the mistake into holly and sewed it on straight.

All through the project I have been doing my best to remember to record how long I spent working on the quilt. I added it all up last night and it was 43 hours. I’m actually pleased with that. Not too bad really.

And here is the finished result.