Binding and Thimbles

This past month has been my busy season for making t-shirt quilts and long arming for customers. In two months I have made 6 t-shirt quilts start to finish-  prepared the shirts, graft the patterns, sew it all together, long arm quilted it and added binding that is hand stitched, then long armed three large quilts and bound three more quilts. All this to say I have not blogged anything for quite awhile. Now I need to sort and clean my sewing areas so I can dive into some of my own projects.

This is a longarm pattern board with a stylus. I also use paper patterns and do custom freehand quilting.

Here is the quilt using the circle pattern that the customer chose.

I don't wear a traditional thimble when I'm binding a quilt. When I try to use a thimble, what ever finger does not have a thimble is the one I use, so the thimble is worthless for me. I also hold my finger with a lot of stress to keep the thimble in place, so I use a "ThimblePad" by Colonial Needle Company. It is that leather dot on my finger. They come in a pack of 12 with a pretty strong re-usable adhesive.

A Little Bit of Purple

Don't these purple sashing strips for a t-shirt quilt look awesome all cut and labeled and ready to go? I sewed the strips onto the prepared t-shirt quilt blocks and finished everything up- 72" x 52". Such a sense of accomplishment!

Just imagine the whole thing finished, purple sashing sewn on to all the squares...

And now you might notice a little problem. Where is all the purple sashing? Well, I misread the order. I made it mostly purple with a little black trim, instead of the other way around. ARGH! So.... I spent a whole day ripping and re-sewing (Never fun. NEVER FUN!)



If it had been a t-shirt quilt for me I would have decided to love it just as it was, but being a customer quilt I needed to rip it all out and re-sew. It DOES look very good as ordered, all BLACK with a little bit of PURPLE.

These little hearts appliqued onto black fabric is one detail I really love on this quilt. It is a great way to add small t-shirt art work into the quilt and make the quilt even a little more special.