When I ordered the Dressed to the Nines quilt kit I also ordered some backing fabric. When it arrived I discovered that it had a more cream background than white (I ordered on-line and it was hard to tell). Once the quilt top was all finished I decided I couldn't live with the backing and chose to use some black solid yardage from my stash instead.
It came time to get started on the quilting and I pulled out my black fabric. Unfortunately, I didn't have as much as I thought so that idea went out the window. As luck would have it, I had a couple more yards of some black and white fabrics that I'd purchased to use with my embroidery machine projects. Eileen Roche had suggested buying yards of clearance black and white fabrics because they are really good at hiding the jump stitches and bobbin thread when doing embroidery machine quilt projects. I actually had two that would work with my Dressed to the Nines top. One had a very slight tinge of green in it that matched the green in the top pretty well. The other was a straight black and white floral print.
As you can see, I chose the pure white background and I think it is a really good selection. I pieced it as a panel down the centre of the backing, with the solid black on either side. I can't believe I was able to piece together such a large backing with 'free' stuff I had in my stash! Yay!
I was also pretty impressed with myself that I figured out all the math and sewed really straight seams. I've decided to use my frame set-up and get this quilt done fast. I am going to do a simple meander because the quilting won't show much on the busy top anyway. I already ordered my So Fine and Bottom Line in black so it's all ready to go. Now that I have the tension on the 1600 set well and everything seems to be working as it should, doing a large stipple will eliminate the constraints I have with the quilting area as I'm not locked in to following a pantograph line and I can just adjust my quilting as my space narrows. It should be a fairly relaxing process as well as speedy. I'll share the results when I'm done.
That is really pretty - I love it!
Posted by: Maureen | March 25, 2014 at 09:14 AM