Finishing and blocking

Today I finished quilting “Coloring Grandma’s Garden.” As with most quilts, you can see the edges were somewhat wavy by the time I was finished, and the quilt did not want to lay perfectly flat. This is one of the “good” areas, after I smoothed it out and tried to make it flat. Too bad I didn’t photograph the entire quilt when it was misbehaving. In any case, I really needed to block this quilt before I put on the binding. Otherwise, the binding would be off, too, and the quilt would never be flat.

I took a few measurments across the quilt to determine how long the sides should be, and I cut pieces of 1/8″ ribbon the correct length. I pinned the ends of the ribbon to each corner. Then I eased the quilt into the length of the ribbon. Once all four sides were pinned, I sprayed my quilt with water and used an iron to coax the extra fullness to lay flat.

You can see a closer view of the scribble quilting in this picture. I’m wondering if viewers will understand that I wanted the quilting lines to look like the little girls were “helping” Grandma by coloring the quilt blocks and making them look like flowers. Oh, well. I’m not about to rip it all out now.

This is what it looked like when I was finish blocking the quilt: absolutely flat. Now I can leave it to completely dry overnight. Tomorrow I’ll bind it and add the sleeve and label. Then I’ll finally be done! (And it “only” took 340 days!)