Completing the Magic of Crete Block of the Month

Today we are going to finish the quilt for my BOM, Magic of Crete.

Once the border has been stitched on we are then ready to make a quilt sandwich and decide how we are going to quilt the top. To make a quilt sandwich you will need backing fabric, wadding or batting and the quilt top. 

I have used an extra wide backing which is 108" wide from Fabric Freedom, you can use the usual width quilting cotton but you would need to piece it to make it big enough. There are many different fabrics you can use for the backing, not just quilting cotton, as an example, if you wanted to make the quilt extra warm you could use brushed cotton.

Wadding or batting comes in many types. If you want to keep the costs lower then you can use polyester wadding which usually comes in different weights, my preference is a bamboo and cotton mix batting. The one I have used in this quilt is from Sew Simple, Super-Soft Bamboo Blend which is 50/50 Bamboo/Cotton with scrim, I bought 1.5m for this quilt.

To make a quilt sandwich lay your backing on to your surface first, wrong side up, then the batting and lastly the quilt top.

Check out the video below from the Fat Quarter Shop which shows in detail how to put together your quilt sandwich.

I used basting spray 505 and curved pins to baste the three layers together ready for quilting.

After basting the quilt I used paper parcel tape to mark out where I wanted to stitch my quilting lines. 

I kept it very simple, I divided the quilt in half and marked the stitching lines 4" apart across the diagonal on each half as you can see in the following picture.

Once the quilting is finished you are ready to bind the quilt, this is the last step! I used the same fabric for the binding as for the outside borders. I cut my binding strips 2.5 " wide by the width of the fabric. The following video from the Fat Quarter Shop explains how to measure your quilt to calculate how much binding you need, and how to machine stitch it to your quilt. There are a few different techniques for joining your fabric ends, this video shows just one of them.

Once I had  machine stitched my binding on I decided to hand stitch it to the back of the quilt using DMC Coton Perle no. 8, col. no. 3760, which highlights one of the shades of blue in the quilt top. Here is a close up of the handstitching on the back of the quilt.

So there we have finished the Magic of Crete Block of the Month!

Happy stitching!