Quilting My Triangle Salad Quilt

I decided that since my Triangle Salad quilt was fairly busy, I’d just quilt it with an all-over design. Besides, I hardly ever have time to do custom quilting on my own quilts, because I’m too busy quilting for customers, so that helped my decision somewhat.

But first, I had to prepare a backing for it.

My first inclination was to go with solid white. I had two issues with that:

1. I didn’t have enough solid white to do it with
2. I wanted something a bit more lively.

So I dug through my stash and found this wild thing!

While I was a bit worried about it shadowing through, I quickly decided that on this quilt, it doesn’t matter. This is a usin’ quilt, and I wanted it to be cheery on both sides!

Since my quilt is 56″ x 66″, two widths of the fabric at 40″-44″ usable inches would certainly be long enough, so I needed to measure out the width I needed. I like to add at least 6″, but usually try to do 8″ if I have enough fabric to spare, so in order to put this backing together, I needed two lengths of yardage that were 64″. So I measured those off and cut them, and I still have some of that fabric left over!

To put them together, I matched them up, right sides together, and pinned all along one long edge:

Then I sewed them together with a 1″ seam. I did this so that I would effectively get rid of the selvedges.

After stitching, I went back and trimmed the seam to 1/4″, trimming the selvedges completely off. Some folks like to leave this seam at 1/2″, so feel free to use the width you personally prefer.

I then pressed the seam to one side. Some like to press it open. Again, do whichever you prefer.

I then loaded the backing on my frame, then my batting. I mainly use Quilter’s Dream Poly Select, and that’s what I put in this one as well.

I got the top loaded, and chose a quilting design. I chose this pantograph called “Marmalade”, by Patricia E. Ritter and Leisha Farnsworth. (I bought it from Urban Elementz online.)

Here are some poor-quality photos of how it looks quilted out on my quilt top.

You can definitely tell that my machine isn’t computerized!

So now that I’m finished with that step, I can attach that binding I made earlier! I’ll be back Friday with a post on how I do that, so stay tuned!