Spring Wreath Quilt Along: Week 4
Congratulations if you’ve made it this far in the Spring Wreath Quilt Along! By now, you should have a completely pieced quilt top, all ready for quilting and binding. To prepare the backing, you will need to piece two equal lengths of fabric together. Basically, you’ll just chop the backing fabric in half, then sew it back together on the selvage sides. This will make a more square piece of fabric, rather than a long rectangle.
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 floral pattern, stitched in light green thread for a little bit of added interest. The color blends well with the fabrics in the wreath and shows up in a fun way on the white background.
If you don’t have a longarm quilting machine and would rather do the quilting yourself, you can absolutely manage a quilt this size 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 realize that this can be a time consuming part of the process, so don’t feel too rushed at this point. However, we have lots of great binding tips, so let’s move on to the final step in making the Spring Wreath Quilt! First, you’ll cut the binding strips. We’re cutting 2 1/4″ strips, since we will be machine binding this quilt.
Once the strips are cut, we sew them together on a 45 degree angle. Trim the extra triangles, then press the seams and press the binding strip in half along the whole length.
Once the binding is made, you’ll be sewing the strip to the quilt. If you want to sew the binding onto the back of the quilt by hand (this is the most traditional method), you will sew onto the front of the quilt first. Since we will be doing all of the binding by machine, we start by sewing the binding to the back of the quilt.
If you need a refresher on turning corners, you can watch this reel we made last year: How to turn corners when adding binding. Notice that we use a walking foot for all of the binding sewing. This makes a noticeable improvement in the finished look of our quilt.
Here’s our favorite fail-proof method for joining binding ends:
Once you’ve joined the binding ends and sewn all that down, press the binding toward the front of the quilt. This little extra effort makes it easier to sew onto the other side, and we do this with both hand sewing and machine sewing methods.
It’s finally time to sew the binding on the front. Make sure to switch thread to a coordinating color. We used a light blue that matched both the binding and the quilt backing. We also set our needle to automatically go down, as there’s quite a bit of shifting and moving the quilt around. Sew as close to the fold of the binding as possible.
You can see how we use our fingers to hold a large section of the binding over at a time, and how it looks when it’s done. You can give the binding one more good pressing and then the quilt is complete! It’s up to you if you’d like to add a label. Just look at this springtime beauty!
You can share your progress in a couple of different ways (even if you’re not caught up!):
- On Instagram: use the #springwreathqal 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 Spring Wreath 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 Paint Box quilt starts on May 30th! We will post next Monday about what you’ll need to prepare for that.
