orange peel fmq

Woo-hoo! I finished the first of the three FMQ practice baby quilts. 

All those scrappy 2" squares were totally begging to be quilted using Elizabeth Hartman's orange peel quilting. As I said before, this was my first try doing this kind of quilting and it. was. stressful!

I was too stiff and tense, gripping my quilt sandwich way too hard which kept distorting the stitches and made for some very uneven peels :(

Thankfully it did get better and a little easier with each row and my peels started looking a bit more uniform.

After all the quilting and attaching the binding on, I let the washing machine and the dryer do their magic and they did not disappoint. The quilt got such a nice crinkly texture and the quilting, while not perfect by any stretch of imagination, looks good enough.

I pieced the backing using some solids and print fabrics from my scrap bins, and attached a green solid binding by machine.  Lately I've been attaching my bindings by hand but since this was a practice quilt, I thought I'd practice the machine binding, too.

That part, I must say, went really well and I'm quite happy with how the binding looks. Even the corners came out nice and pointy. I'm thinking attaching the binding first to the top of the quilt and then machine stitching it in the ditch from the top might become my go to way of finishing the binding off.

 Finished size of this quilt is 45" x 45" and I used Katy's tutorial which you can find here.

Thanks so much for stopping by. Svetlana