Woodland Wander Quilt Along: Week 5

Can you believe we’re already to the last week of the Woodland Wander Quilt Along?  By now, you should have a finished quilt top that is ready for quilting and binding.  Make sure you have your backing fabric, batting, and binding fabric ready to go.

You have a couple of options when it comes to quilting: quilt it yourself, or hiring a longarm quilter to quilt it for you.  The second option can be super convenient and gets you professional results, but it is also an added expense.

If you’ll be quilting this one yourself, we have a few tips for you.  First, matching your thread color.  The best way to tell if your thread will blend is to unwind a small length of thread and lay it over the quilt top.  We were lucky to have the perfect color on hand!

Since we have our own longarm machine, we do all of our own quilting on that.  For small projects, we sometimes use our regular machines for quilting, in which case we use our walking foot or special BSR quilting foot.

We did alternating swirls and pebbles on each row of the background, and a sort of swoopy zigzag for the tree branches.

Here’s a closer look.  Since this is a smaller quilt, it didn’t take too long to do all this custom quilting.

For the binding, we used the same fabric as the background, which gives a nice effect without drawing attention away from the trees.  We like to machine bind on the regular.  You can see a step-by-step in our Scrappy Binding Tutorial.  The walking foot is our favorite for machine binding.

We love how this one turned out!  Here are some glamour shots of the finished quilt on Old Main Hill at Utah State University.

We were able to find enough of this awesome print from One Canoe Two in our stash for the backing.

Weekly Giveaway

For our last weekly giveaway, we’re happy to have another quilt kit from Bluprint!  This week, it’s the Boardwalk Quilt Kit.

The kit includes the quilt pattern and all the fabric necessary to make this quilt.  To enter the quilt along giveaway this week, you can only enter by posting a photo of your progress on your Instagram page, using the hashtag #woodlandwanderquiltalong.  You DO NOT need to be caught up, just show us where you are!  If your Instagram account is private, we won’t be able to see your photo, so make sure to post on a public account.  Also, this prize is open to US entries only, because of prohibitive shipping costs.  You have until midnight MST on Sunday, July 7th to post your photo.

After this final weekly giveaway has ended, we will open entries for the grand prize, so stay tuned for more details on that next week!