quilts & binding

ahhhh, the pinkredgreyblack quilt is done! man, i wish photographing quilts wasn't so hard, they never look as nice as they do in real life. the colours in the above pic aren't quite spot on but the ones below are pretty close (on my monitor, anyway).





i chose a lovely cream cotton/linen backing with small black stripes after considering many other more colourful options. even something simple like white with small red polka dots somehow made the whole quilt look overwhelming and too busy, this one seemed to balance it out perfectly and has a nice, soft hand to it. i hope it will keep little ruby cozy and comforted for many, many years to come! i made her a matching quilted cushion to go with it so she'll have a sweet set for snoozy good times : )



now, on to the binding. i love this binding. i love the fabric i picked out for it at amitie and the fact that my machine binding is coming out pretty much perfectly after so much practice. i actually enjoy binding these quilts. i know that the quilting purists out there are shuddering with horror that i don't sew my bindings by hand but i've always been one to do things my own way, especially if it's easier, faster and looks nice and tidy, as my machine binding does. i'm a terribly slow hand sewer and these quilts take me quite long enough as it is, thank you very much.

anyway, i get heaps of comments and questions about my machine binding and had every intention of doing a tutorial to walk you through it. i started taking pictures of the steps as i did this quilt then realised it would be easier and better explained if i just point you in the direction of the two tutorials i used to learn myself. amy karol of angry chicken has done a much better and more entertaining tutorial of machine binding than i could ever do (she uses bias binding and i use straight binding but the technique is the same) and fi of dearfii's explanation of creating mitered corners is pretty much perfection. using these tutorials together is how i learned to bind my quilts on my machine and there is no point trying to improve on something that is already done damn well. so check them out and try it for yourself and let me know how it goes for you. good luck!