Paint Box Quilt Along: Week 4
Congratulations if you’ve made it this far in the Paint Box Quilt Along! By now, you should have a completely pieced quilt top, all ready for quilting and binding. Since this quilt isn’t wider than quilting fabric, you won’t need to piece the backing before quilting. Just make sure you have a few inches around all the sides in case things shift around slightly while quilting.
For this quilt, we chose to hire our favorite longarm quilter Cami, also known as @littleyellowbicycle on Instagram. After consulting with Cami, we chose an allover meandering pattern called Malachite from Urban Elementz. This design reminds us of pools of paint! She stitched it out in white thread to blend the bright colors of the paints in with the white background. Here’s a fun video of her machine going!
If you don’t have a longarm quilting machine and would rather do the quilting yourself, this is a great size of quilt to do on a domestic machine. Our favorite domestic machine quilter is Christa of Christa Quilts. She has books, a Youtube channel, and lots of tutorials to help you with this process.
We have a fun option for this quilt to add curved corners (hence the bias binding), which we will show you just how that works next. If you haven’t already, you’ll need to cut the binding strips. Make sure to use bias binding if you want to curve your corners, too. If not, you can use either bias or straight grain binding. Here’s our process of making the binding from the cut strips. Make sure to overlap the diagonal edges so that they meet where the seam will be sewn.
Once the binding is ready, it’s time to trim the quilt top down. We always start trimming with a square ruler in the corners, and then a long straight ruler to match up the corners. It gives us great results! For the curved corners, make a copy of the template from the book and trace the curve onto the quilt. Use sharp scissors to cut the curves.
To attach the binding with curved corners, you won’t have to do the traditional mitered corners, but you will have to ease the binding around the curves. Take your time with these! You may want to even pin the binding in place if you aren’t experienced sewing curves. We are machine binding (per our usual), so we start by sewing the binding to the back.
A couple of tips for the curved corners: We recommend pressing the binding around the corners before you sew it down on the front. This will help the bias “set” around the corner. If your seam allowance got a little bigger on the curves, you will want to trim it down to 1/4″ as well.
After the binding is sewn on the back of the quilt, you can join the binding ends and finish sewing the binding onto the front just like a regular quilt binding. (You can see our favorite binding joining method on week 4 of the Spring Wreath QAL).
You can share your progress in a couple of different ways (even if you’re not caught up!):
- On Instagram: use the #paintboxqal and #theclothparcel hashtags. You can also tag us @theclothparcel. Note that if you have a private Instagram account, we won’t be able to see any of your posts.
- In our private Facebook group: you can share photos in a post or in the comments of any of our posts. You can also ask for help or advice there!
- On this post: you can leave a comment telling us about how things are going for you.
We would love to see your progress, and every post you make on Instagram, in our Facebook group, or comment on a quilt along blog post will earn you an entry into our prize drawing!
Thanks for joining us in the Paint Box Quilt Along! We would love to see your finished quilt. Let us know if you have any questions in the comments.
Don’t forget that our next quilt along for the Piece & Joy Quilt starts on July 11th! We will post next week about what you’ll need to prepare for that.
