Just Face It!

It was time to put one of my own designs onto the longarm and I wanted to cross hatch the whole piece.  Not a problem except the blocks were 20" and I would have WAY to many stops and starts in the middle of open spaces.  After some discussion with my gal pal  about loading the quilt 'on point' and then doing the stitching straight across I decided to do a test run on a smaller piece.

I started by lining up the center of the quilt top from left to right to make sure the center row of stitching would go directly across the top, then I stitched the rows up towards the top point. After that, I rolled to the center and stitched the bottom half.

The one discovery was that I should have used a full piece of batting instead of putting the batting on  point like the quilt. When I rolled the piece, it was funky. Lesson #1 learned.

After turning the quilt, I had to line up the piece so I had an exact straight line again, left to right. Lesson #2 learned. This seemed easy in theory, however there was a bit of fussing involved.

Since this was a test piece, I figured I'd keep on testing and for the first time, I faced one of my pieces.  I have another piece waiting in the wings that a binding would not do it justice, so here is my first attempt at facing a quilted piece.
Lesson #3 was clipping and grading the seams in the corners to get a good turn. 

It pays to have a small test piece when you want to try out new techniques. After all this, my original piece did not get cross hatched, nor did it get faced. But this piece got finished, almost by default and I call that a win! One more finish from the sewing room. Yeah for me!

Keep on stitching,
Sharon