On Nanny's Lap

My Winter's Lane quilt is finished, it is a lap quilt for my mum so I've called this 'On Nanny's Lap'.   Despite some quilting bloopers, I love how it turned out and it's perfect for mum to use on her lap while reading in her special chair.  It is sparsely quilted, with a quasi-random grid of rectangles and squares.

The design is my own (front and back).  I took a charm pack of Winter's Lane, came up with a block layout that I liked, framed each block in a beige-grey then used a cream homespun for sashing and borders. The binding is from Ro Gregg's Lady in Red collection.

This is my first person sized completed quilt (Ruby's quilt is waiting patiently for me to piece a back for it). Here's what I learnt with this quilt:

• It's great having a wall big enough to layout out your design but Blu tack isn't the best option for sticking blocks on your wall - pulling the blocks off repeatedly pulled some of the patches out of shape.
• When quilting, it's actually rather tricky to sew perfectly straight with a walking foot.  A nano-second of inattention leads to wonky stitching.  
• Inspired by the success of my seam allowance guide, I used masking tape as my straight line quilting guide.  This worked fine so long as I didn't actually sew on the masking tape, because then it was tricky to remove all the bits that get left stuck under the stitching.
• When quilting, guide all three layers of the quilt together, don't nudge just the top layer under the needle when trying to stay straight - otherwise this happens on the back of the quilt:

• When using a walking foot, there seems to be an optimum speed - its neither too fast nor too slow but probably closer to too slow.  Annoying, the right speed for you and your machine is something you'll just have to figure out.
• Some quilters trim the back and batting before sewing the binding on, and some trim it after sewing the first side of the binding on.  Presumably there's pros and cons of each.
• Joining the start and end of your binding using a diagonal seam is soooo much trickier than tutorials make it out to be, especially if it's past your bedtime when you are trying to do it.  I unpicked it 6 times and just could not figure out how on earth my binding kept ended up twisted once joined.  So pleased with myself when I got it right on the 7th try - the photo I've pinned here was the key to getting it right, so thank you so much Red Pepper Quilts!
• While I was piecing the back I had a vision for how to quilt it - so when I was basting it I kept that vision in mind.  Turns out that vision was really just a billboard highlighting my inexperience because it would have meant turning the quilt 90 degrees many, many, many times.  So I unpicked a whole lot of quilting, while surreptitiously glancing over my shoulder worried the quilting police were heading my way - I mean, is that the done thing?  Do people unpick their quilting?  My vision also presented many questions for which I didn't know the answers, and was too lazy far too busy to bother surfing the net to find.  Questions such as - how do you stop and start quilting if you're not just going from one side to the other?  Do I backstitch?  I still don't know the answers to those questions.

Thanks for reading if you're still with me after all those bullet points!

Linking up to:

Needle & Thread Thursday at My Quilt Infatuation

Thursday Threads at 627Handworks

Finish it up Friday at Crazy Mom Quilts

Bloggers Quilt Festival at Amy's Creative Side

TGIFF hosted this week at Quilter in the Closet