Quilted Table Runner

Every time Pete and I go to visit his family in Seattle I seem to come back with a new craft project! This time was no different, my mother in law, Nancy, showed me how to quilt. I have a new found appreciation for quilts and quilters, knowing the time and patience it takes to make everything line up.

Nancy first handed me a book called Block Party and gave me a few choices of what would be a good first quilting project from this book. We decided on a table runner. The cool thing about this book is that it has patterns for what seems like a gazillion different quilt squares that are all the same size so they can be put together easily.  I sat, studied the squares and came up with three that I liked and thought went well together.

Nancy then sent me into her sewing room to find fabric from her stash. I first saw this awesome orange colored one and started pulling fabric from her different boxes (organized by color) and ended up with 4 fabrics, not including that first one I liked, but something even better. The primary colors!  Once I decided on fabric, I had to choose how to organize them in the three squares to make them all unique... I wanted them all to be different but corresponding.

I cut pieces out very carefully and followed the explicit directions in the book and from Nancy (she sat with me for the first one!). Who knew there was so much pressing with the iron and lining up of seams to make these things work out, but magically it turned out!  Once I had one square done, I was on my own running out to the garden, where Nancy was working, when I had a question. I ended up with three pretty sweet quilt squares. We then decided to put on the corresponding border, a muslin outline, and then came the batting, backing and the trim. I even learned how to make mitered corners on the trim!

This is what turned out:

Deciding on backing & trim fabrics.

Completed front.

The back. This fabric has the look of being a quilt, but it's really one piece.

I hand quilted a few ties on it, to hold the layers together.

Mitered corners! I hand sewed the trim on the back side while on the plane.

Not bad for a first quilting project if I do say so myself!