Bars and Stripes...Finished!

This quilt is finished and now at work keeping me warm at night on my bed!

Many times I have made a throw quilt by quilting a pieced top onto polar fleece. It is so easy and I love the fuzzy-on-one-side, cool-and-smooth-on-the-other-side nature of these quilts. I had never tried it with a full sized bed quilt before, though, so I used a microfleece blanket (thinner than polar fleece) from my local BiMart in Washougal. This worked out well indeed.

Basting was easy--I just used safety pins. Quilting was easy--just straight lines along the bar panels. Plus the quilt "sandwich's" minimal bulk allowed me to work this very large quilt through my Juki with no wrestling matches.

Maybe I should call this an Open Faced Quilt Sandwich!

Anyway, as to the finishing...wait til you see how quick that was.
All in all, as Borat would say, this was a "Great Success!"

First though, have a look at Bars and Stripes' predecessors....

This was actually my second ever crazy quilt, made in 1999. It is all cotton (I didn't have anything but in those days) with cotton batting and backing, and you can still see the influence of all the strip piecing I was doing then in these blocks. I free-motion spiral-quilted it for a neighbor's daughter, who was going off to college.
The bars are actually made of blocks.

This quilt also alternates bars of plain fabric with crazy pieced ones. This time some of the CQ bars are composed of blocks, and others are long pieced bars on a foundation.
This one, made of all silk, was quilted in the ditch between the blocks and along the bars, but not around the individual pieces. My sister-in-law has it.

For my quilt, I wanted to keep the quilting minimal, but have it show just a little bit. Plus I wanted to experiment with using #8 perle silk as my quilting thread.

As long as I went slowly, my Juki could handle the heavy thread just fine. I used a size 110 Jeans needle, a free machine foot, and the feed dogs UP.

One of those recessed sewing machine tables would have been nice, but we make do!
In this picture you can see I switched machines to apply that lace (using a zigzag, which my Juki doesn't have). I had put the quilt on the bed and decided that a little more lace needed to be on there.
Quilts don't live their lives on design walls, after all. Seeing it in situ showed me what adjustments I needed to make.

Even though I love my Bias Tape Maker from Simplicity, I still didn't feel like making a traditional binding for this large quilt, which is somewhere between a Queen and a King in size.
Then the very forgiving nature of the microfleece gave me an idea.....

It doesn't fray.
Plus, there was no exposed batting edge that needed covering--so no binding was required at all. I just had to cover the edge of the quilt top, really. So I sewed on rick rack! This attached the two layers to each other around the perimeter of the quilt as well.

First I zigzagged down the center of the rick rack with a narrow clear thread.
Then I made a second line of stitching, this time using just the straight stitch on my machine, to secure the tops of the V's in the rickrack to the quilt top.
It was the easiest "binding" I ever made, and I love the way it looks on the bed.

It is just so cozy, draped over a down comforter.
I still need to make some pillows, including the crumb-pieced one from earlier this fall.

But right now I want to get back to Meg's Home Portrait....