NCM day 2

March 2  Round up from yesterday:  finished quilting the Bark Bark quilt and adding binding.  I just need to tack the binding down on the back, wash it, and it's ready to go into the shop!  No work on socks but I did discover hexipuffs.  If you're a knitter and haven't heard about them, you're missing out.  Check out Tiny Owl Knits to find out more.  I think I've become obsessed because it's like a quilt but it's knitted.  I have little bits of sock yarn lying around and this is the perfect project to use some of it up!  I also am hopefully participating in a mini skein swap on Craftster.

Bark Bark Baby Quilt

I just got done pinning a quilt.  Hopefully, I can start quilting it tomorrow.  I thought I'd share a bit of my quilting process. 

The first thing I do is lay out the back of the quilt.  I live in an apartment and I use the linoleum floor and I use masking tape to tape it down.   Makes it a lot easier to NOT have the quilt moving around when you pin it.

Next the batting on top.  And if you have a super fluffy cat named Smudge, he helps with this process.

 

Anyways, if you get the cat off it eventually, you smooth the batting out like so:

  

 So now comes the fun part, you put the top of the quilt down and smooth it out again.  Now it's time to pin.  I might overpin in some people's opinions, but for machine quilting, I find it so helpful to have that many pins.

 

 Smudge thinks he's helping again.  In typical cat attitude, he appears to be ignoring me!

A good way to figure out what thread is good for quilting, you can pool it on the quilt and see how it looks.   This is a blue and brown sulky variegated thread.

In the middle of pinning:

Close up of how close I pin.  I usually do about 2" apart, but it kinda varies, I just put lots of pins to keep everything flat and held together.

 
Finally, all the way pinned.  Takes at least an hour and I don't want to even think about the number of pins that I put in this quilt.  This is only a small baby quilt so  I didn't use all my pins. 

Now I get to decide how to quilt it.  I'm leaning toward a loose stipple.  Loose in the sense that it's not super close together.