Bindings Abound

It's Sunday night and I have 3 tops with bindings on them and one waiting to get done. I promised myself I would quilt my own top this weekend, the Christmas 2007 top that hasn't seen a holiday table yet. This will be done and out for Christmas 2009.  As much as I will machine applique, machine piece, and machine quilt, I just can't bring myself to putting the binding on by machine. How about you, are you a hand binder like me? It's my favorite part of making a quilt, my last chance to work on the piece, and my last chance to give it my best effort on a plump and neatly stitched edge.

As usual, clicking will give you close ups of my pics.  This was an interesting pattern.  It's from Kim Diehl's book Simple Seasons. I have all her books and I love them. This one calls for the strips for the branches (arms) to be cut on the straight grain, so that when you go to applique them down, they will bend and crease and be a bit knobby like branches. This was hard to do at first, as I was trying to get them to be as flat and even as possible. Once I gave up on this idea, it became easier to applique and I love the finished product.  I put a layer of batting under my snowman so the background print wouldn't show through the white. Plus they have a bit of dimension to them.  I uses a freezer paper method and hand appliqued the inner border.

The snowmen have got their eyes, they need some buttons down the front, and the binding needs turned and hand stitched to the back.  I might do a bit of  'big stitch' quilting on the appliqued border, the stitch in the ditch just doesn't seem like enough quilting. I'll wait until I turn the binding, that may be enough for now.

Here is a panel that I have been hand quilting, finally got it finished and now it's ready for the binding.

And I'll end this post with Miss Molly. She LOVES her new back yard, no traffic, no kids, just a quarter acre fenced in all to herself. She's surveying her domain!

Hope you found some time to sew this weekend.
Sharon