Sweet Strawberry Quilt Along: Week 4

Woohoo! It’s the final week of the Sweet Strawberry Quilt Along! By now, you should have a freshly finished quilt top, all ready to quilt and bind. First off, prepare your backing fabric. We chose a basic from Ruby Star Society called Brushed. We have used this print in various colors many times for backgrounds, backing, and binding.

Using the backing fabric yardage listed in the book, you will take that length of fabric, cut it in half, and then sew back together along the selvage sides.

Once that is finished, you are ready to layer your backing fabric, batting, and quilt top and get quilting. We used our longarm quilting machine for this one, but the motif we used could easily be done on a domestic machine with a walking foot.

We used the channel locks on our longarm to quilt horizontal straight lines. It’s a classic design for us that looks good on anything!

After quilting, the next step is to trim the excess batting and backing away from the quilt top. We love our giant square OLFA ruler for this. You can get one here. (affiliate link*)

We like to trim all of the corners first with the square ruler, then use our 6″ x 24″ ruler to trim the sides to meet the already-trimmed corners.

Next step, make the binding. We just picked up a fun tool for pressing binding, called the Binding Eaze (affiliate link*). It’s a silicone mat that your iron sits on while you pull the binding through to get pressed. Check out this video to see how it’s used:

Pretty slick! You do have to pay some attention while you’re using it, but it’s a nice-to-have tool for sure.

Once your binding is made, you just need to sew it onto the quilt. You’re almost there! We usually opt for a machine binding, unless we know there’s going to be time to sit and do it by hand (which is almost never).

Once you’ve sewn the binding on, make sure to give everything one more good pressing, especially the binding.

And there you have it, the Sweet Strawberry Quilt! This quilt is the perfect size for a wall hanging or baby quilt. We hung ours on the wall above Audrey’s staircase, but not before we got some glamour shots in the backyard strawberry patch.

It looks right at home! We can’t wait to see your finished quilts. You can share your progress in a couple of different ways (even if you’re not caught up!):

On Instagram: use the #sweetstrawberryqal 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!

We would love to see your progress on Instagram or in our Facebook group!

Thanks for joining us in the Sweet Strawberry Quilt Along! Let us know if you have any questions in the comments.

Don’t forget that our next quilt along for the Sprinkles Quilt begins on October 17th! We will post next week about what you’ll need to prepare for that, but you will for sure need the Piece & Love book, so make sure to grab a copy if you don’t already have one.