Hello, everyone! It’s been a while. Since I last posted, I (successfully) defended my Master’s thesis (we have a required oral defense for the MA thesis) and am cranking out some serious papers for the end of the semester.
But! A little over two months four months since I finished this, I’ve finally had the chance to take better pictures of my Strip & Flip quilt!
This is a really brilliant, simple, satisfying pattern, and I just love how it turned out. As I said before, I didn’t quite follow the pattern exactly: I cut strips that were 2 1/2″ inches wide, instead of 2″ wide, and I pieced them really carefully, so that the final dimensions of the quilt are about 42″x52″
I decided to echo the white lines on the front in the backing of the quilt, which was just enough to let me use a single cut of Kona cotton (a little under 2 yards) to back this quilt — but it was iffy in places, and if I did it again, I might opt to give myself a little more wiggle room.
I quilted it pretty simply: first I filled the vertical white columns with white stitching, which I think makes them look sort of column-like, and then I quilted horizontal lines more or less randomly across the middle column, which involved a lot of fussing and tugging to get the wider part of the quilt to fit in my sewing machine.
Then I had a dilemma. I considered doing a different style of free motion quilting in each strip, to give the back of it a sort of scrappy, varied look, but I decided it varied too much from the straight lines already present on the back of it. Instead, I picked every fifth strip and quilted across it back and forth.
It leaves about an 8″ gap between quilted sections on the wide side, which makes me a little bit nervous.
So I have a question for more experienced quilters:
Should I run some additional quilting lines down those sections? I know Warm & Natural says you can quilt it every 10″, but those are awfully LONG 8″ sections… (And before you ask, I have no idea who’s going to be using this one, but probably a child.)
I considered doing a scrappy binding, or using one of the prints in the top for the binding, but I decided that would just be too much going on. Instead, I wandered over to my local fabric shop (it is three blocks from my house: let’s just say the owner and I chat when I go in, I’m there that often.) I looked over their solids, and chose a deep blue (Kona Ocean, if I recall correctly). I tried to use Red Pepper Quilts binding tutorial but I have yet to figure out exactly what counts as 1/4″ when I’m using my walking foot, so the stitch allowance was too wide, and I wouldn’t have been sure to catch the folded over binding if I stitched in the ditch. Instead I bound it by hand, while watching the news over the last couple of nights.
Any questions? I really enjoyed this one — it’s a great chance to pick fabrics (I’d consider doing this in all neutrals, or all greys, or all reds (etc) if I had enough of them!). And it comes together very quickly without looking like it, which is always satisfying.
Knit-Spin-Quilt 
Wow, I love that quilt! That definitely looks like something I want to try for a quick baby quilt sometime. :)
And congrats on your (presumably successful) defense!!!
It does look cute. I super wanna make one of my own now.
Very cute and colorful quilt! What a great finish.
This is such a pretty quilt. And a big congratulations on your thesis defense!! What school are you graduating from? I’ll have to defend my thesis orally, too, but I’m just about to begin work on it, so that’s a year or so away from now.
I would probably be a little nervous about the open areas in the quilting, too. Especially after it was washed a couple times and the batting starts loosening up. A couple of thoughts popped up – You said you quilted in every 5th stripe? What about going back and doing a stitch-in-the-ditch mid-way between those quilted stripes? Or, it’s often very nice to combine linear quilting with organic quilting. If you’re comfortable with FMQ, you could add a meander or a swirl between the lined stripes – either covering the whole area, or just the two stripes in the center of the spaces.
In any case, it’s a really lovely quilt!