Piece & Joy Quilt Along: Week 4
Congratulations if you’ve made it this far in the Piece & Joy Quilt Along! By now, you should have a completely pieced quilt top, all ready for quilting and binding. For our backing fabric, we were able to get a large piece of Rifle Paper Co. fabric at a great price that matches the style of the fabric on the front pretty well.
Because of the uniformity of the fabric design, we thought it would be really noticeable if the print didn’t match up on the backing seam line. We decided to match the print in the seam, so it looks like one continuous piece of fabric. It’s a fun way to bring a little bit of attention to the back of the quilt. Here’s how to do it:
If you’d like a more in-depth video tutorial, we like this tutorial by Patchwork and Poodles. She goes over the steps in detail. Once your backing is all ready, it’s time to quilt! We chose to do the quilting ourselves for this one, with a custom design of starbursts/snowflakes on a string in the white background and free motion scallops in the tree.
The straight lines were done with a ruler, since we don’t have a computerized long arm quilter. Once you have your quilting done, whether by machine, hand, or check, it’s time to get the binding on. We had a lot of leftover fabric from our fat quarter bundle, so we went with a scrappy binding. (Click here for our scrappy binding tutorial.) With fat quarters, you need twice as many strips and you’ll have twice as many seams.
Since we chose prints that all have the same background color, you can hardly even tell. Sew the binding on, and your Piece & Joy quilt is complete!
There’s nothing better than a freshly finished quilt. Here’s how the pattern matching on the back turned out:
It’s such a great overall effect!
You can share your progress and enter our grand prize drawing in a couple of different ways:
- On Instagram, use both both #pieceandjoyqal and #theclothparcel hashtags in your post. You can also tag us @theclothparcel. (Please note that if you have a private Instagram account, we won’t be able to see any of your posts. You are welcome to screenshot and DM us for your entry to count.)
- 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 from fellow quilters there!
Entry deadline: August 12th
Every photo you share on Instagram or in our Facebook group will earn you an entry into our grand prize drawing at the end of the quilt along!
Prizes will be a queen size batting from Hobbs Batting, along with patterns, stickers, and pins from us. We hope you’ll participate in the fun! As a note, you do not have to completely finish the quilt to be entered in the drawing. Winners will be announced on August 15th. Let us know if you have any questions in the comments!
