Quilting on New York Beauty

Confession time...quilting (the stitching of the layers together) is my least favorite part of making a quilt. It intimidates me. No matter how much practice or how much I psych myself up, I'm always terrified of taking those first few stitches in my layered project. This only applies to big projects, though. Small, like less than 20 inches square small, are fun. They're easy to manipulate and quick to stitch.

So when I saw this quilt as you go tutorial by Maureen Cracknell, I was intrigued. It's funny, because when I first saw it, I thought, "Wait. You can't do that!". Me, the person who tells everyone that there aren't really any rules, is freaking out over batting being sewn in a seam. I've been mulling it over since she posted it and decided, why not? What have I got to lose? And this technique jumpstarted me on the quilting of my New York Beauty quilt.

One of the biggest advantages to using this method is the ability to use up batting scraps. I have very few large pieces of batting on hand and tons of small leftover pieces.

I'm having a blast quilting on each square.

The quilting shows up better on the batting side. I'm following most of the curves, then stitching along one side of each point to the edge of the block. I'm hoping that I'll achieve a little bit of motion by quilting the points all in the same direction. One of the disadvantages of this method is that the detailed quilting won't show up on the back.

I'm marking all of the lines on each block with masking tape which keeps me from drawing any kind of lines on the fabric.

After quilting, each block is trimmed down and squared up to be 8-inches. I haven't started sewing any rows together yet, so we'll see how that part goes. The best part of this whole process is that I am now sure I will finish this quilt before the end of the year.