Quilt as you go (part three)

 Once I had the layout planned it was time to sew the blocks together. Once they were sewn together  then the seam is folded over the front of the block and sewn down.  The video tutorial (Teresa Down Under) shows this both better than I can describe it and better than I could sew it.

I thought sewing down the edge of the sewn strips would be easy, but oh I had issues still it was done 64 blocks became 32 paired blocks and so on till I had eight strips of eight.

The folded seams were to again be machine sewn , again the tutorial covers that. I made heavy weather of it and found it difficult to ensure I caught the edges in. So I ended up doing it by hand.

By hand took longer than I expect by machine would have done.

The finished top looks pretty much the way it did on the layout, just a little bit sharper.

The back however was a very nice surprise, it looked better than I had anticipated.

It reminds me of patterns on Illuminated manuscripts. However my delight in the back gave ne a bit of a labelling conundrum. I did not want anything that would obscure or detract from the pattern created by the quilting lines or the blocks.

So I sewed on the "label" information in a dark blue thread. It is there if you look but not standing out at all.

Peter's sewn down shirts...2022. Why, well this quilt is going to my friend Peter. When he was much younger (and littler and I could rest my elbow on his shoulder) he regularly wore shirts with button down collars to church. He disliked them being buttoned and would delight in undoing them and I would button them back up. It became a running joke for many years. Until as he was older (and bigger and could rest his elbow on my shoulder) and I could not reach those buttons and he stopped wearing that style at all.

So the material for this quilt made me recall that and is reflected in the title of the quilt.

It is big enough for a throw and happily he liked it (front and back) that is always a relief when you do a quilt on the basis of what a person might like.

By the time I was finished this journey into the quilt as you go I was firmly of the opinion never again.

But perhaps I might, maybe I would get better at it, of the joining method night work for other quilting designs.  Only time will tell which is the case.