Candyshop Ready for Quilting

I've spent a lot of hours on this quilt this week.

 This was either the end of the day Wednesday or the beginning of the day Thursday.

 I just love the exuberance of all these different fabrics and the combination of different block patterns.  It reminds me of those wonderful mid-twentieth century scrap quilts made from all the leftovers from making clothes--except these have more updated colors and the polka-dots and stripes theme, of course.

 Since I was sewing at church during VBS to save many, many miles and much time commuting, it was a perfect opportunity to use the wonderful silver spoon pincushion made by my friend Harriet--and can give Sweet Teen a little bit of Aunt Harriet in her quilt too.

I spent Thursday making the backing.  I added a row of 18-inch piecing between the two widths of the backing fabric to make it long enough for the 79 x 96 inch quilt.  I thought I'd taken photographs of that, but guess I must have forgotten--so will get shots of the back later.

 I need to remind myself that it takes at least an hour to cut the batting to the quilt size and get the three layers stacked.  I had to go buy a batt because I did not have one of the proper size.  I bought a Hobbs 80/20, so we'll see how that works.  I had stopped using Hobbs 100% cotton a few years ago because I had to clean one too many batts of too many pieces of trash.  This 80/20 batt looks like a big improvement.

Quilt tips:
Use a large ruler to smooth hard-to-reach portions of the top to keep it absolutely flat and aligned.

Many quilters use painter's tape to tape the backing down so it will stay absolutely flat.  I was working on the tables at church and quickly realized that if I didn't want to deal with tape popping up, a second piece crossing the first at a right angle would prove invaluable.  I didn't have a single instance of "popping" tape.

My fingers are still tired from all those stitches, but it is sooooooo much faster than inserting and closing safety pines.  It took a little over two hours to do all that basting all by myself.

Now I get to do the fun part:  quilting!

One couple attending one of the meetings at church came in to tell me the story of the prayer quilt they recently took to his brother who has been diagnosed with lung cancer. He really liked it (meaning they chose well), but after they'd been home a while they received a phone call from him saying how much it makes him think of their now-deceased mother and the quilts she used to make.

In other news, we received another half-inch of rain last night.  (Of course, that means I'll need to spend part of tomorrow taking care of weeds!)  Nice to have the monsoons back, even if we're not getting the amount of rain that's falling in a lot of other places.

Am linking to Sarah's Whoop, Whoop and Amanda at Crazy Mom Quilts where you can see what other quilters have been up to.

Happy quiltmaking.....