ALTERING FABRIC TO MAKE IT YOUR OWN & BINDING TECHNIQUE

Something I often do is alter fabric to make it "my own" or manipulate fabric appearance . In this case, I am talking about fabrics for the binding on my quilt, Tuscany. Yesterday, my dear husband squared up my quilt Tuscany after I removed the facing (see a earlier blog about why a facing didn't work on this quilt)....After removing the facing, the edges were lumpy, so my husband and love of my life, squared it for me. He has helped me in the past many many times squaring quilts, so he knows the routine. There is no way I can use a rotary cutter at this point because it would mean putting weight on my arm and shoulder and I sure don't want to screw up my recovery of my rotator cuff after going through surgery!

Once the squaring was done, I asked my husband (very sweetly, I might add) if he would consider cutting the strips for my binding. He agreed and with my assistance, he cut the 2 1/2 " strips I needed of various fabrics for the binding on my quilt.  My goal was to cut "like" colors" used in the quilt for the binding. In one case, I didn't have a speck of fabric left over, so I "altered" another fabric to make it appear the same as in the quilt. 

The technique I used was to color around 3 inches of a very similar Stonehenge print with a peach Neocolor wax pastel and smudge the color with my finger. Here's the original color and the altered fabric.

BINDING
Instead of using the typical method of joining strips when switching from one fabric to another on my binding, I tried something new because I wanted the binding to match the fabric in the quilt exactly. My method was to leave extra fabric on each end of each color of binding, then fold a portion and insert it into the other folded edge where the two fabrics meet. It is confusing because you have to look on the front of the quilt and front of the binding vs. looking from the reverse side as it won't line up properly. Here's a photo showing how the binding will look:

Next time, I will try and set up my camera to record a video so I can show you in person how I accomplished these techniques!
That's it for today.
XXOO Joyce