How to Hang a Quilt with Picture-Hanging Strips

Welcome to my first web tutorial!

A couple years ago I was gifted an excellent modern quilt in my guild’s annual Secret Gift Exchange.  The best place to hang it (and almost the only bare space big enough in our apartment) was over the fireplace, on a brick wall.  I wondered: how am I going to hang a quilt on a brick wall?  Any adhesive strong enough would surely damage the quilt, now or when I took it off, and I quailed at the thought of trying to install hardware onto brick.

Then I realized I could hang the quilt the same way I had hung a framed poster and three bulletin boards on the same brick surface: with picture hanging strips!  Command makes these two-part strips that lock into each other like velcro, to hang framed things on the wall without damaging the paint.

One set of strips go onto the back of the frame, the other onto the wall, and they lock together to hold the frame in place.  This creates a stronger grip than the poster-hanging strips, and can take a lot more weight.  On an uneven surface like a brick wall, this will work even better with a quilt, because the quilt is flexible and can bend around any irregularities in the surface.  All it takes is one extra step and a little whip-stitching, and you can hang a quilt on an unfriendly (or lease-protected) surface with the greatest of ease.

How to Hang a Quilt with Picture-Hanging Strips: The Tutorial

This is a straightforward process that anyone with a minimum of sewing skill can perform.

You will need:

1. A quilt
2. Picture hanging strips.  You’ll need one pair for each end of the quilt, and one for every eighteen inches of width along the top edge.  (So, for this 30″-wide quilt, I’m using three pairs of hanging strips.)
3. Scissors
4. Needle
5. Thread (basic sewing thread is fine)
6. Thimble (recommended)
7. Optional: someone to help hang the quilt and make sure it’s hanging straight

Here’s a summary of the instructions, for people who like to get right to the point, or for you to check later:

1. Take half of the strips; remove the paper and adhesive backing.
2. Whip-stitch the prepared strips to the top edge of the back of the quilt below the binding, one an inch from each corner and every eighteen inches, being careful to only pick up the backing in your stitches.
3. Gently attach the remaining wall-strips to the quilt-strips.
4. Position the quilt on the wall.
5. Remove the paper backing from the wall-strips, and press into place gently.
6. Peel off the quilt, apply pressure for 30 seconds to each wall-strip, and then wait for an hour.
7. Hang the quilt!  Re-align the strips on the quilt to the strips on the wall, and press hard, locking the strips.  Enjoy!

And now for the details and pictures.

Preparing the strips

For the strips that will attach directly to the quilt, we’re going to sew them on, rather than using their adhesive.  They can easily be removed later if you want (much like a hanging sleeve), and the adhesive won’t actually hang on to the fabric anyway.  So the first step is to remove the sticky part of the strip.  Fortunately, they’re designed to make this easy: it’s the same thing you do to pull them off of the wall.

First, divide your strips into two equal groups.  Set one group aside to use later; this step is just for the ones we’re sewing onto the quilt.

Take your first strip, and peel the paper backing off.

Next, take the tab at the bottom of the strip between your thumb and forefinger.  Holding firmly onto the other end of the strip with your other hand, pull the tab sideways to peel the adhesive off the back of the strip.  It should stretch and peel off fairly easily.

Your prepared strip should now look like the bottom one below.

Repeat with the rest of the strips that will be sewn onto your quilt.

Applying the Strips to Your Quilt

First, decide which way is up on your quilt, or which way you want to be up.  We’ll be sewing all of the strips along the top edge, on the back, just below the binding.

Position one of your strips on the back of the quilt, on the top edge you’ve selected, near one corner.  I recommend leaving an inch or two between your strip and the corner.  You’ll see why later on.

Holding the strip in place with your thumb, use a whip-stitch to sew the strip down to the back of your quilt.  Pick up just a few threads of the backing fabric with each stitch, as if you were sewing on a hanging sleeve.  (For beginners, be careful to just pick up the back of the quilt with your stitches; don’t push the needle all the way through, or the stitches will show on the other side!)

Stitch down the whole outside edge of the strip, tying a knot once or twice as you go.  When you get back to where you started, tie a knot and cut.  I don’t think there’s any real need to bury the ends, but if you want to, then by all means!

Repeat to add a strip at the other top corner of your quilt, and another one about every eighteen inches along the top edge.

Hanging the Quilt

From here we’re going to be following the manufacturer’s instructions for applying Picture Hanging Strips, which you can also read on the back of the package.

Once all your strips are sewn on, take up the remaining strips.  Gently attach one to each strip that you’ve sewn onto the quilt, making sure they lock a little bit, but not completely.

You may need an extra person for this step, depending on how big your quilt is.  When you’ve decided where you want to hang it on the wall, position the quilt on the wall, making sure it’s hanging flat and level.  While holding one half of the top edge in place, fold the other half down at an angle, and peel the paper backing off the strips.  Gently fold that side of the quilt back into place, pressing firmly on the strips.

Repeat for the other half of the quilt.

Gently peel your quilt away from the wall.  The wall-strips should stick to the wall; if one comes off, disengage it from the quilt and put it back in the right place.

Hold pressure on each wall-strip for thirty seconds.

Wait for an hour.

Now you can hang your quilt!  Align your quilt-strips with the wall-strips, and press hard; you should hear the velcro locking into place.

If you suddenly decide that it should actually be an inch to the right, fear not!  You can peel off the quilt and move it about an inch either way, and press it back into place again.  (This is why we left an inch or two at each corner when we sewed the strips on; it leaves room to hide the end of a wall-strip that might otherwise poke out and be conspicuous.)

Enjoy!

 

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New Whole Cloth Quilt for Sale!

This is my most recent finished piece, “Variations on a Squiggle.”  It began life as a simple quilt sandwich to practice with on a rented longarm machine at Olde City Quilts; I took their class a few months ago, and I was itching to get back and use one of those machines again!  I cut two pieces of muslin and a corresponding rectangle of cotton batting, packed my Quilter’s Planner and an Angela Walters book, and spent a lovely two hours doodling away on the longarm.

I had no plan when I started, just the two books and my memory of some motifs that I learned from The Inbox Jaunt (which I can’t recommend enough, by the way; beautifully clear instructions and a million cute motifs for free motion).  I scribbled and meandered, wandered and looped, and whenever I didn’t know what to do next I’d find a good stopping point (usually one of the edges), flip through one of the books, find my next design, and take off!

It was a liberating, centering creative experience, almost a form of meditation, to make this; I was so focused on trying things out, drawing the lines.  Everything else fell away.

When I was done, I took a look at the whole thing and was surprised at how cohesive it looked.  One of my favorite things about free-motion quilting is that it’s very forgiving; you might think you’re doing a terrible job in the moment, but as soon as you pull back and see the whole, all the imperfections sort of blend into the background, and you find yourself marveling at the idea that you could make something like this.

Since it came out so well, I decided to finish it!  I found a lovely mulberry cotton in my stash for the binding, sewed a hanging sleeve to the back, and added a label.  (I bought some sheets of printer-friendly fabric last year.  It goes through the printer quite as easily as shipping labels; you just have to remember to press the label with the iron for a few seconds to set the ink.)

“Variations on a Squiggle” is now listed for sale in my Etsy store.  It’s been hanging in my living room for a few days now, and continues to be an object of visual interest, so I’m hopeful that somebody out there will want to hang it up in their home too.

Next time, my first web tutorial (really this time): How to Hang a Quilt with Picture-Hanging Strips!

An Old Project Returns

A few weeks ago I resumed knitting Aron’s Aran sweater, which I started last year.

By which I mean, I finally decided I definitely WAS making it on needles that were too small, and unraveled it and started again.

The bigger needles are producing a much more supple knit, and I’m borrowing a trick I learned from a sock knitter and making the back and front at the same time, each from its own ball of yarn.

But of course, last week I got bored and decided to start a smaller project as a break from this long-term goal.

This is going to be a chunky cowl for my sister-in-law, who’s very artistic and a little bit goth.  I think she’ll like the color scheme, and the chunkiness.  (The yarn is Schoppel Reggae Ombre, in two colorways.)

Now, what is that red-white-and-black quilty pile in the left-hand corner of my pictures, you might ask?  Unsurprisingly, it’s a quilt, the quilt that this post is really about.

I don’t have a picture of the whole thing right now, but you get the general idea.  I made this quilt for one of my brothers ten years ago, as a gift for his high school graduation.  He was about to start at Texas A&M, and very excited about it, which is what inspired the color scheme.  If memory serves, I picked the double Irish chain pattern because it was interesting, but not over-complicated, and I thought it would work well with the colors.  In the ten years since I gave it to him, my brother’s taken this quilt everywhere: to college, on tours with Drum Corps International, various bachelor pads, and most recently to his billet with the Marine Corps.  There is no higher compliment for a quilt or the person who made it.

So you might be wondering why I have it now, and how it made its way back into my project queue.  We had Christmas at my parents’ house, and my brother asked me if I would take a look at his quilt, because it needed some repairs.  I said sure.  But when he showed it to me, the top edge of it was completely split open (because apparently I made this quilt before I learned how to bind things properly) and the batting (polyester (horrors!)) was separating in a big way.  Not to mention that the borders were coming apart in places, and the backing (flannel) was tearing.

What can I say?  This quilt has lived an active life.

Now, while I am fully of the opinion that it is right and proper for a quilt to be loved to death, I was hoping for a longer lifespan for this one, and the damage was such that I told my brother I would have to take the top and the back apart and completely re-quilt it.  (I also remembered that this was the first quilt I ever machine-quilted, and I did it with just a regular presser foot and not the walking foot, which made the stitching really tight.  Did I mention I was self-taught?)

He was at first reluctant to entertain this plan.  (I don’t think he thought that I would ruin it; he just didn’t want me to take it away (and possibly never give it back…).)

I eventually persuaded him that the quilt would be better once I’d overhauled it (if only because the batting would be cotton instead of polyester), and that if he didn’t let me take it it would only deteriorate faster.  He finally agreed when I offered to get him a replacement blanket to tide him over while I worked on this one.

And after all that, it’s still taken me almost four months to get around to it.  I am the procrastinator par excellence.  😦

My mom visited me in February, and while she was here she completely unpicked the quilting stitches and tossed out the batting and the backing (which were both in tatters). Last week I bought a new backing for the quilt (the exact same JoAnn’s polyester-cotton blend that I used to make it ten years ago), and this last Sunday (after a break in the wake of finishing my Green Deconstruction quilt and a gift table-runner) I finally picked up my brother’s quilt and started mending the borders.

Unfortunately I came to the conclusion that the borders cannot be mended.  They’ve got holes worn in them around the edges in some places, and have gotten very uneven in others from the backing being pulled off.  They also had the A&M logo embroidered into them at the corners, AFTER I’d layered and quilted the quilt, all the way through the quilt sandwich, and those stitching holes are never coming out.  So, I’m cutting new borders, probably out of my stash of black Kona cotton, which is not going to perfectly match the poly-blend black squares that make up the pattern (especially not after ten years’ washing), but I think it’ll be okay.

And I’ve discovered that I pieced this quilt, like my first two quilts, with hand-quilting thread.  Which, if you don’t know, is very thick and meant to be used only for hand-quilting, and should never ever be run through a sewing machine.  How I got my machine to handle it I’ll never know.

So yeah.

 

I’ve got two of the borders off now; I’ll cut new ones, sew them on, embroider the logo into the corners, and then she’ll be ready for re-quilting.  With the walking foot this time, and cotton batting, and a proper binding, and at long last, a label.

And then, once it’s completely overhauled, back it goes to the Marine Corps!

Tune in next time for my first web tutorial: how to hang a quilt with picture-hanging strips!

The Garden of Light Green Meditations

I wrote this post as the opening for this blog last year, in May, so it’s a bit of a time-travel piece.  Why I never published it, I’m no longer sure.  All my time referents should be understood as dating from that time.

I’ve just finished a project and am about to embark on some new ones, so it’s a perfect time to start a blog.  Hello! My name is Nicole, and I am a fabric addict.

Fortunately I am also a quilter, so some of the fabric gets put to good use.  Of course, I’m always undertaking more projects than I could possibly finish.  A couple years ago I decided to make a list so I could keep track of them, and was flabbergasted to discover that I had no less than eighteen things going at that particular time.  Last week I started talking about designing a new quilt for one of our nephews, with the very modest aim of giving it to him for Christmas (seven months from now), and my husband asked me, “How many quilts are you in debt right now?”  (In other words, how many quilts am I definitely planning to do and have bought stuff for, that are unfinished or not started?)  I counted them up in my head, and replied, “Nine.”

So you can understand how excited I am to have actually finished something.

This particular quilt, as you might have gathered, is entitled “The Garden of Light Green Meditations,” which is in honor of two things: the sashing (which was only selected as the perfect fabric after much anxiety and suffering and several phone calls); and its predecessor and progenitor quilt, “The Garden of Orderly Pathways.”

You can get a better idea of the colors from this picture:

I designed and made “The Garden of Orderly Pathways” for my brother-in-law (intending to give it to him for Christmas 2014 and actually giving it to him for Christmas 2015, by which time he had forgotten about it and was very surprised to finally receive it).   The motifs are batiked, rather than appliquéd; I free-motion quilted around all the squiggles in complementary colors (mostly variegated) so that the motifs would show through on the backing, which is black.  It came out really well and my brother-in-law absolutely loved it.

When we showed “Orderly Pathways” to one of my husband’s aunts, she liked it so much that she offered me money to make one for her too.

Which makes this the first quilt that I have ever made for sale!  At that time (December 2015) I hadn’t yet decided to start my Etsy store (The Velvet Pincushion), so this was a brave new world for me.

I’m also excited to have it finished because this has been the project that wouldn’t end.  I started it in February.  I knew I would be free-motion quilting each motif (as I did with the first quilt), and it had been so hard wrestling the first quilt through my domestic machine to quilt around all the tiny squiggles, that I decided to do this one quilt-as-you-go: quilt each square first and THEN sew them all together.

I read tutorials, I watched videos, I was confident I understood the method.  I finished the quilting in pretty good time (considering all the tiny squiggles), and thought I was practically done.

Attaching all the blocks to each other couldn’t take as much time as the quilting had, could it?

Sure it could.

The thing about quilt-as-you-go is, that when you assemble pre-quilted blocks together, you have to cover the join both on the front and on the back.  This means each joining has to be sewn three times: once to attach the front and back sashing to the edge of the first block; once to attach the other edge of the front sashing to the second block; and once to attach the other side of the back sashing to the second block.  Multiplied by forty-one blocks and twenty setting triangles.

First you arrange the blocks into rows.  Then you join the blocks together to make the rows, and since everything is on the diagonal, there are two rows that have only one block, two that have three, two that have five, two that have seven, and one that has nine.  That one almost seemed to stretch across the room.  (Did I mention that this quilt is made with wool batting, so the long rows also got really bulky and heavy?)

Then you sew the rows together.

And the quilt GROWS…

I’m sure you will understand that there were times when I carefully avoided wrestling long heavy strips of quilt through the sewing machine, with the result that a week or two went by when I got nothing done on it.

But the other thing that happened, was that the more the quilt grew, the more beautiful it became.

I finally put the binding on last Saturday, and sewed the label on on Sunday.

Yesterday I took it to my local English Conversation group (more about that another time), and everybody oohed and aahed over it, and some of the people who were holding it up just stood and stared at it for a while, and there’s no higher compliment for a quilt than that.  Tonight I took it to my quilt guild for show and tell, and got many more compliments and quite a few questions.  It’s great to have a venue where I can talk about my process.

Later update: The quilt’s recipients have been very pleased with it.  They commissioned this to go on their bed, but my aunt-in-law told me a few months ago that they were getting hardware to hang it on the wall instead, because it’s too nice for the bed.  On one level, I find that really flattering.  But another part of me is yelling, “No!  Quilts are for sleeping under!”  But the really important thing is that they like it.

Stay tuned!  New stuff next time!

 

Green Deconstructions

My Pantone color challenge quilt was finished just in time for the guild meeting on Wednesday!  Here it is complete.

It was so much fun seeing how everyone had interpreted the challenge!  Almost thirty members of the guild had made a mini with this same green fabric, and every quilt was so different, reflecting its maker’s interests and unique skill set.  Some were whole-cloth and intricately quilted, others were more traditional or more abstract.  One that I thought was an overhead view of a forest turned out to be a microscopic close-up of algae!  You can see the pictures on CJMQG’s Instagram page.

So I left off last week with the promise of chopkeys, which I used to make the three-dimensional shapes.  I learned the technique in a workshop with the accomplished Rami Kim (whose gallery of exquisite works you can see here).

To make a chopkey, you need templates in two sizes: one for the foundation fabric (which can be muslin, since it won’t show), and a larger one for the fashion fabric.  To make a triangle with one-inch sides, your foundation template should be a triangle with, say, 2″ sides, and the template for the fashion fabric should be a triangle with 3″ sides.  Once your fabric pieces are cut, pin the corners of the fashion fabric piece to the corners of the foundation fabric piece, like so.

You’ll then have some extra fabric between the corners.  Squeeze it together in the middle of each side (approximately), and fold it to the right on each side, and pin.  Then, moosh down the poof in the middle, gently, and it will form a triangle!  Fabric magic, no?  Then press and steam, to make crisp folds.  (More complete instructions (plus templates) can be found in Rami Kim’s excellent book, “Folded Fabric Elegance,” from which you can also learn other cool techniques for fabric manipulation.)*

I figured I could make shapes with as many sides as the fabric would put up with, so I drafted my own templates for each of the regular polygons up to the nonagon.  I had to draw some practice shapes to make sure that the resulting chopkeys would be big enough to baste onto hexagon templates, so I could sew them into the quilt.  Here’s the square one being basted.

Even so, I did need to make some adjustments when it seemed like the resulting shape would be too big or too small, but they all came out, even the nonagon!

The folds around the edges did make it slightly more challenging to sew these pieces to their neighboring hexagons, but since I was working by hand it was only a little fiddly.

Now, if you’re wondering how the blue crevices came into it, here’s what happened.  I had made all my hexagons and demi-hexagons and was sewing them together to make the left side of the design, working inwards.  I got to a point where it was getting a little cumbersome to add a new hexagon to the growing section, so I started making a new section with the rest of the colored hexagons, figuring I could join those together first to make sure they were all in the right place, and then join all the sections together later.  I was thinking as I did this that the upper-right quadrant of my design was kind of boring, and I’d have to do something creative with the quilting to make it interesting, but I wasn’t sure what that should be, and I felt strongly that the design needed another element, but that an intricate quilting motif wasn’t necessarily it.

And then I laid out one of my sections on the blue batik to make sure I did want to use it for the binding.

And suddenly it occurred to me: I had plenty of this fabric, and this whole design was sort of about abstract disintegration already.  Why shouldn’t it disintegrate a little more?

And with a little more thought and a pair of new, smaller hexagon templates, I had this.

And now I didn’t have to sew my sections together!  Or sew on several of the remaining green hexagons for that upper-right corner.  🙂

I removed the templates from each of the crevice-edge pieces one a time, basting the loose edges with cotton thread as I went.  (Nylon thread might have melted under the steaming that was coming next.)  I then removed the rest of the paper templates, steam-pressed each section, and glued it into place on my blue background, just like I’d done with the floating hexagons.  I didn’t appliqué the edges; I just assembled the quilt sandwich and started quilting!

(Sorry these photos are a little dark.)

It ended up being a really simple quilting design, but that worked.  I usually backstitch rather than going to the trouble of burying ends (bad, I know), but for this project I felt a little more finesse was called for, and I knew it would show if I did it every time.  The thread is a variegated green Mettler Silk Finish, which I used in The Garden of Light Green Meditations last year.

So, once the quilting was finished, there were a million ends to bury.

I also ended up adding a small stitch at each corner of the chopkeys.  I had planned to add a little decorative stitching just inside their edges, but in the end decided to let them speak for themselves.  The stitches at the corners were just to make sure they didn’t eventually unfold themselves.  I made them with coordinating thread to keep them unobtrusive.

I’m REALLY  happy with how the whole thing turned out.

This is sort of my first foray into abstract design, and I feel like it ended up even better than my original concept.  It’s my first pieced back, as well!

Coming soon: a long-awaited post about a gift for a friend, and a tutorial for a technique I devised to hang a quilt on the wall with picture-hanging strips.  Stay tuned!

 

*I am not affiliated with Rami Kim; I recommend her work because it is excellent.

What’s up, April?

…And another month goes by before I post again.  Predictable, no?  Especially on the heels of a resolution to post more often.  Well, we’ll see what adding “Blog” to my to-do app on a repeating basis will accomplish.

I think part of why I haven’t been posting lately is that I’ve been working on a couple of projects that, until recently, were secret.  I still won’t post about one of them, because it’s a present for someone and she should really get to see it first, but my Pantone Color Challenge quilt has been out on Instagram for a couple of weeks now, so let’s talk about that for a while!

The challenge was issued by the Central Jersey Modern Quilt Guild, of which I am an enthusiastic member.  Pantone’s Color of the Year is “Greenery”, so those of us who signed up for the challenge were given a half-yard cut of Kona Lime, which was judged to be equivalent, and told to make a modern quilt with it measuring 18″ square.  I tend to think of myself more as a post-modern quilter; I like breaking categories and defining my own artistic space, but I also love rising to meet a challenge, and I decided I wanted to make something REALLY modern for this one.

After a couple of weeks of thinking about it, lying in bed one night, I came up with this:

I’ve got a special love for hexagons, since they were my grandmother’s favorite shape to work with, and the hand-sewing in a small EPP project like this is a great way to unwind in front of Netflix.  The color mix was inspired by my much-beloved collection of Rowan shot cottons, which I acquired last year in a splurge of self-indulgence (along with some of their lovely woven stripes) and hadn’t used yet.  The column of geometric shapes, I planned to make three-dimensional, using the chopkey technique that I learned in a workshop with Rami Kim two years ago (more on that later).  The hexagons of diminishing size, I planned to make by sewing bands of green fabric around the edges, but I later decided that that would make them look like they were receding into the background, while I wanted them to float on top.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Once I had the design, my husband helped me do a fabric pull.

Basically I just laid the greenery fabric in the bottom of the laundry basket, dumped my whole collection of shot cottons and woven stripes out on the dinner table, and the two of us went through and tried things next to the green fabric. When something worked, we threw it in the basket.  My husband doesn’t make things himself (except physics theories) but he has excellent color sense, and I often ask him to help when I’m making design decisions.

I then had to make a second version of the sketch.  The first one was just a free-hand thing and didn’t use the right measurements for regular hexagons, and since this project had to finish to a specific size, I needed to know how many templates to cut and what size they should be so I could actually fit in the whole design.

That produced this, which you will notice still does not have actual regular hexagons in it, but does have the right number of irregular ones to make an 18″ square.  And if I hadn’t done the second sketch, I wouldn’t have known that my column of geometric shapes would have to end in not an octagon, but a nonagon!

I decided where the colors should go within the design  and assigned each colored hexagon a letter, which I in turn wrote on the template piece that each color was basted to.  For the smaller floating hexagons, I followed an interesting technique that I learned from Modern Handcraft’s Modern Hexies Tutorial.

 

First, you cut and baste the hexagons to templates, just as you would for English Paper Piecing.

Here’s my smallest one.

Once the hexagons are basted (with cotton thread), you press and steam them, to make sure they’ll hold their shape.  Then, cut the basting stitches, take out the template, position them on the fabric where you want them, and glue them down instead of sewing.  If you don’t apply glue all the way to the edges, they appear to float on the background!

I’ve been really happy with the results.

Next time, chopkeys!

Marigold is Finished, Part II

So we left off last time with the question of Marigold’s sashing. (See previous post to read Marigold’s story from the beginning.)  Or is it called a facing?  I think I’ll go with facing; it’s less confusing.

In a quilt-as-you-go project, the quilted blocks have to be joined together and the raw edges covered, which is accomplished by joining them with a facing both front and back.  Traditionally, the last step is sewing down one edge of all the back facing by hand.  You attach the front facing just as you would sashing when piecing a quilt top, and on one of those seam lines, put the back facing and the back of the quilt right-sides together, sew the facing down, and then fold it over.  So three edges of your two facings can be attached by machine; easy peezy.  But then, you have to either sew the last edge down by hand, or top-stitch it through the entire quilt sandwich.

That’s exactly what I did last year with The Garden of Light Green Meditations.

As you can see, it has a narrow green facing on the front (blending into the sashing around each block), and a corresponding black facing on the back.  You can see it in the corners in this picture.

I cut my black facing to be folded double, like a binding, and to finish just a little bit wider than the green facing.  I followed the steps for attaching the front and back facings, but instead of sewing down the last edge of my black facing by hand, I fastened it down with basting glue, turned the top of the quilt up, and stitched in the ditch along the edge of the green facing, catching the last edge of the black facing on the back.  This worked almost perfectly; there were a few spots where I didn’t catch the black facing and had to go back and hand-sew, but it was only about a half-hour of hand-sewing instead of the rest of my natural life.

But this approach wouldn’t work with Marigold.

It worked with The Garden of Light Green Meditations because the front and back facings were the same size.  With Marigold, I wanted a wide sashing on the front, but a narrow one on the back, to make the batting join more neatly.  So, as I so often do, I agonized for several days before coming to the conclusion that I’d been right in the first place: apply the back facing like a sashing, and sew down the front facing/sashing with topstitch.

Having sewn down the back facing (right side to the back of the block sandwich, sew, flip over, press, right side to the back of the next block sandwich, sew, flip over, press), I pressed over the seam allowance on one side of my gray facing/sashing strips.  

I then lined up the folded edge with the points of the diamonds, glued the folded edge down, and folded under the other edge to match the points of the other block.  Then, topstitch!

This of course gets more challenging as the assembled pieces grow in size.  (The pink post-its are there to mark which way is up.  They wouldn’t actually stick by themselves, so I added safety pins.)

But it never became too difficult.  I really recommend quilt-as-you-go for projects like this, with a few large blocks.  The Garden of Light Green Meditations had forty-one ten-inch blocks and sixteen setting triangles, and while quilting them individually was fantastic, joining them all with two facings took all eternity.

And once the front sashing was on, it was a simple matter of binding and adding a label.  And then waiting for a nice day to do a photo-shoot.

The finished quilt measures 63″x82″, and I’m very proud of it.  It’s listed for sale on my Etsy store, and I hope I’ll be sending it to a good home very soon.

In the meantime, onward!!