Autumnal Equinox Today

This is the combination of the two zig zag quilts that I had originally intended as single bed quilts.  I decided that I needed a king sized quilt more and used a technique of combining the two quilts that I had seen on Melody Johnson's blog (see the side of mine to click on it).  


Basically you sew a very narrow strip to the front and back on one of the halves.  Then you sew the front strip to the second half of the quilt top.  You can just sew the back strip at the same time but I prefer sewing it down by hand.  It really leaves a very nice finish (IMHO) and I may use this more often.  I have done quilt tops piecemeal before but like this technique much better.  You are basically butting the edges of the batting and quilt top and backing with little strips on the front and back of the quilt.  So now I have a quilt that measures 86 x 114 and will be plenty big enough for our king sized bed. It was the first quilt I have machine quilted with the Juki and I love the way the machine handles.  It was especially wonderful for attaching the binding around the outside -- I don't know but it seems to just sew straighter.   So now lots and lots of hand stitching to get that binding on!  I am working on machine quilting the next strippy quilt -- all quilt in the ditch on this one but on the diagonal on a very large quilt.

This is a closeup of the front where I combined the two quilt tops.  You can see the narrow strip in the middle.

Our weather has been overcast and cloudy for the past week which is unusual down here.  The local weather forecasters said there were interesting levels of clouds moving at different speeds because of the combination of all the weird fronts here.  Here you can see at least three levels with the big puffy clouds in the middle.  Well, I have to entertain myself somehow!  Despite the dire predictions, it didn't rain today and we even had some sun.  The rain literally hopped over Wilmington!


Tomorrow off to the Screen Gems studio tour and then to see a couple of houses!