Journey of Quilting

Week 5 {Finishing your quilt top}

Swell quilt top  Welcome to week 5! It's time to finish our quilt top and get ready to quilt. You should have your rows laid out how you plan to sew them together. {I know many of you have different number of rows so this tutorial is simply a guide.}

First, we need to stitch one row to another to form a two row block. Pinning is very important to this step.
You want to line up the seams that connect your blocks together. The wonky seams will not match!

When you place your row RST, the seams should "butt" up against each other. Pin on each side of this seam. The two pins at each seam should be enough to keep your rows together. Don't worry about the ends of the rows lining up... it's much more important that your seams match as best as they can.

When sewing your rows, do not sew over the pins! Slow down as you approach the first pin. With your needle down, remove the first pin. Sew to the next pin, leave the needle down and remove that pin as well. Stitch to the next seam and repeat until you have your two rows stitched together. Press this block of rows open and repeat this process until you have all your rows sewn together into blocks of two.

I find it much easier and more accurate to stitch your quilt top together in sections instead of row by row.
As you can see from my picture, I have 3 two row blocks and one single row. To complete my top, I stitched 1 to 2; 3 to 4 and then step 5 was stitching the two completed sections together.

Our next step is to prepare the backing and baste the quilt. You want your quilt back and batting to be roughly 4" larger on every side that your quilt top. The overage will allow for shifting as you quilt. It's always better to have a little extra instead of not enough!
I want to give everyone a few days to finish their tops, the backing and to gather their supplies for basting so I am going to do a separate tutorial for basting. You will need the following for basting:

  • quilt backing
  • batting
  • basting spray or large safety pins
  • masking tape
If you have any questions about this step or the supplies needed for basting, feel free to post here, email me, or ask in our Flickr group. Thanks for quilting along... I am really impressed with how well everyone is doing!