Nearing the finish line on the “yet unnamed vintage tulip quilt”

 

I’ve got a busy month with a total of 8 events, but I do have a gap between gigs and I got to quilt this week – wahoo! I am nearing the finish line on my vintage tulip quilt (let’s just call it TVQ for now); it’s time to attend to the finishing details.

I am going to call my method of blocking VTQ “The California Way” because I use “tools” that are common to my area. The general method is the same for most quilts: wet, dry and block.

As a review of how I got here, this is a vintage quilt top that I purchased at last year’s show of my local guild, the Folsom Quilt and Fiber Guild. It has some unique properties like “interesting” piecing:

and challenging edges:

that had to be fixed with out-of-the-box solutions:

and quilting on my domestic was a bit of a challenge:

I knew it HAD to have a piped binding. I didn’t feel like this very traditional quilt could use a pimped-out edge treatment; it needed to be simple. I pulled out my Susan Cleveland Piping Hot Binding tool :

This resulted in perfect piping and a beautiful edge treatment:

I had little room to work with on that binding, as the vintage top had sparse fabric around the edge. Look at how little was left when I cut the edges in prep for the binding:

That is cutting it very close for a 72″ x 62″ quilt!

I finished the quilting a few weeks ago and finally had time to begin blocking. First I had to rinse out my wash out markings. I dub this the “California method”. I have a salt-water pool, which is perfect for rinsing out quilts:

I sat on the edge and twirled it around with my feet for about 5 min, then drained it on a patio furniture foot rest:

Once drained, I set it to dry in the sun on my Tiger turf, artificial grass made for pets:

Artificial turf is perfect for drying quilts! It raises it up off the ground and the turf heats up a bit, speeding the drying time; and, it dries flat. I rinse off the turf before I put my quilt down.

Once it is dry, I will pin it to my design wall and square it up using my Laurastar iron system. I loooove my Laurastar! I may make a video of that process and post next week.

And YES, I can use my Laurastar on my design wall, as its “dry microfine steam” does the job without leaving a wet surface. and it will not burn so it is safe to use on my design wall. I can hold my hand in front of the steam. I know, it defies logic; I just know it works.

Hopefully next week it will be a finish!

I’ll be linking up at:
Nina-Marie’s Off the Wall Friday