Adventures in QAYG-Part 2

As an Amazon associate, I may earn a small commission if you navigate to Amazon from my site and buy something.  This will not result in an extra cost to you.

Part 2 won’t make much sense without first reading Part 1, which you can find here.

Once the quilting was done, I laid my blocks out in my (carefully-dog-hair-free) back room and checked to see if I needed to move any blocks around to balance the colors.  There were so many colors that this was a little overwhelming and I didn’t do much adjusting.  Specifically, I didn’t do quite enough adjusting, but I’ll get to that later.  And I started sewing the blocks into rows, beginning with the “bottom” as laid out on the floor.

This was not hard.  I just pinned the first 2 pieces along the edge to be sewn with the back sides together and stitched along the backing fabric as close to edge of the quilt block as I could.  This resulted in a seam on the back, and 2 strips of backing fabric on the front.

I suppose this is a good a time as any to point out the structural weakness in this quilt technique.  In a regular quilt, the whole thing is supported by 1 large piece of batting and 1 large piece of backing fabric (or maybe two pieces, if you used narrow fabric).  But in this particular QAYG method, only a single seam joins the pieces, which is a weak point.  By that I mean, when everything is sewn together, if you were to hold up the quilt by hanging onto the “top” row, all of the not-inconsiderable weight of the rest of the quilt would be hanging off the seam that joins the first row to the second row.  There’s no big piece of fabric to support the whole structure.  If I do another one of these, I’ll think of a different way.  It’s not like there’s only one way to do a QAYG project…

Once I’d sewn the 5 blocks into a row, I needed to fold and sew down the binding strips sticking up in between them.  That wasn’t hard…just fold over and then over again, pin down, and stitch along the edge.  As I worked my way across the row, of course, I had to fit a lot of bulk into the aperture of the sewing machine.  I ended up rolling up the parts of the row I wasn’t working on and using a quilting safety pin to hold the roll in place while I sewed. 

Once I’d stitched down the first two binding strips, I stopped to have a look and realized that if I stitched it down the whole way, I’d end up with too much bulk when I went to sew the horizontal seams.  So I tore out just the bit of the seam at each end which was over more binding strip and not over the quilt, and cut a little bit out.  That worked out just fine. 

I’d like to say that sewing all the blocks into the rows went smoothly.  But that would be a lie.  The first row went fine.  But on the second row, I immediately sewed my inner blocks into the wrong configuration.  I did notice this but not until I’d sewed them all together and stitched down the binding strips on each one.  This necessitated changing the order and orientation of the blocks above this part of the pattern, which I was able to do since I hadn’t sewn them yet.  I moved everything around, resolving to pay much better attention as I sewed the blocks into rows.  And my resolve paid off….right up until I sewed the very last block into the very last (top) row.  Can you spot the problem in this picture?  I might have said a lot of a few bad words.

I had to tear out 3 seams to get that block into the right orientation, but it’s not like I could leave it like that.  It’s idiocies like this that help keep me humble.

Once all the blocks were sewn into rows, it was time to sew the rows together. Since this was going to involve the whole quilt (eventually), I set up a large table in my “quilt room” and put the sewing machine on that.  I started with the bottom two rows and worked my way up.  Doing it this way, most of the bulk of the quilt stayed to the left of the machine and only one row was ever trying to get through the aperture.  I’d sew a long row and then sew down both binding strips before moving on to the next row.

And then finally, it was time for the final binding around the outer edge of the whole thing.  This was done in the same manner as the bindings for the inner seams…fold over once, fold over again onto the quilt block, and stitch down.  The only additional requirement was that I needed to miter the corners.  This is not difficult.

When you get to the corner, do your double fold-over on one side and clip it in place.  Then on the other side of the corner, where the fabric hasn’t yet been folded, fold in at a 45° angle.  Holding that angled fold in place, fold over once, and then again onto the quilt, and you’ll have a mitered corner.  Clip this in place.  If your corner doesn’t miter perfectly, just shuffle the fabric around a little until you like how it looks.  Stitch it down, using an awl or some other pointy thing to hold the miter in place until the needle can catch it.  Easy peasy.

And done!  When I laid it out to admire my work, I did notice one little area that I should have noticed earlier.  As is visible in this picture, on this block, I’d trimmed the jelly roll pieces shorter than I’d done on other blocks, leaving more black. This wasn’t a huge disparity but it’s still quite visible, given the regularity of the pattern.  Oh well, can’t fix that now.  The other problem with this block is that I should have placed it against a different block so that I didn’t have 2 orange jelly roll strips right next to each other.  Again, it’s done now.  Live and learn. 

I am rather pleased with how this looks.  It’s roughly 58” by 69” in diameter, so it’s an odd size, but it will keep someone warm while looking beautiful, so it is fit for its purpose.  And I do think that the black background really sets off the gorgeous fabric in those jelly roll strips. I’m happy with the result.