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| Mystery Quilt |
Quilting Friends, the mystery is solved! Welcome to the final event of The Mystery Quilt Along, a beautiful design by Monique Dillard from Open Gate Quilts. We have been painstakingly piecing, pressing and cutting out eight beautiful blocks over the past few weeks. Now it's time for the most rewarding step of all, that of finishing instructions. It's at this point that all those individual units come together to create a stunning quilt top that you'll love for years!
The Layout: Bringing the Pieces Together
Monique Dillard's finishing layouts are an embodiment of mathematical perfectness. This stage is where you usually end up crafting something ingenious with your sashing, cornerstones and borders to make each of your individual blocks stand out but also to make for a lovely quilt top.
We are doing a lot of work on the technical aspect of the assembly, which is maintaining a flat surface. It is important to have uniform seam allowances of 1/4" when joining sashing strips to blocks. When the sashing or borders are pulled or stretched while going through your machine it can bow the whole quilt top or make it wave. Don't rush and make sure your sashing intersections are all correct, if you take your time in making the right ones, all your hard work of the previous weeks will come together and work perfectly.
Tips for a Perfect Finishing:
Here are 3 practices you'll want to remember as you start at the sewing machine to assemble your final quilt top in the most relaxing and successful way:
- Lay Your Blocks Out: Lace out all eight blocks on your design wall or floor before you sew them. Look back at the distribution of color and value contrast, and rotate blocks as necessary to achieve a well-balanced overall layout.
- Measure Through the Center: When trimming your border strips, do not just sew a long strip and cut the excess from the strip. Rather, measure across the center of your quilt top, cut quilt pieces for borders to that width, and pin so that you don't get wavy edges when you sew.
- Press for Flatness: Press sashing seams towards sashing and border seams away. This will reduce the bulk at the intersections of the blocks and make your finished quilt top look perfect when you are ready to quilt.
Final Thoughts
Finishing the top of your quilt is an awesome accomplishment! Regardless if you are going to do this on a domestic machine, on a long arm machine or by hand, you've made something beautiful to be proud of.
Full Post: The Mystery Quilt Along Free PDF Pattern
