Granny Pilley's patchwork finished at last!

Do you remember many moons ago I found a box of treasure in my local charity shop? The unassuming brown cardboard box had the words 'Granny Pilley's embroidery' written on the side. Words that made my eyes twinkle and my heart race. I could hardly hand over my pennies quick enough to secure the box as my own.

And do you remember this higgledy-piggledy chunk of patchwork hexagons that I found inside that unassuming cardboard box? See... I told you it was a treasure box.
You may even remember that I unpicked and restitched the hexagons adding a border made from fabric I'd also found in a charity shop and a backing made from my Mums old sheet that I dyed pink.Well I have to say if you can remember all that you must have a memory like an elephant! I've just had to check back and I originally showed you 'Granny Pilleys' embroidery box way back in this post in October 2009! How embarrassing that it has taken me sooo long to get it finished. Yes you heard me right I've finally finished the quilt, HOORAY! I did have difficulty quilting it though. I started off quilting by hand and ended up quilting it on the machine and even then I got bored with that too! lol.

I've spent the last few days stitching together strips of fabric for the binding.

Look! How neat is that join? A pleasure to behold for sure!

I pressed it all in half along its entire length, this is the only kind of ironing I do, teehee.

I then pinned the binding to the edge of the quilt.

And stitched it in place moving the needle position on my sewing machine to the right so that I could run the fabric up the edge of the presser foot giving me a 1/4 inch seam. If you can't change the needle position on your machine you can buy a 1/4 inch foot or as you can see in the picture (the grubby beigey patch), stick a strip of masking tape on the foot plate 1/4 inch away from your needle and then use that to guide your fabric against.

I carefully stitched along each edge stopping one 1/4 inch from the end to make a neat corner. (I'll give a link at the end to a fab tutorial for binding quilts) Finally I stopped leaving a gap of about 10 inches and here comes the really clever part.

You trim your strip so that it overlaps exactly the same amount as the width you cut the edging in the beginning. So my edging was 2 and a 1/2 inches wide, so I overlap the ends by 2 and a 1/2 inches.

Then you overlap the two ends like we did when we joined the strips together and stitch at a 45 degree angle. Don't worry the tutorial makes this far simpler than I'm making it look.

Voila!

Isn't that just perfectly perfect! It's at this point you can dance a little jig if you wish.

Now comes my most favourite part of all! OH how I love doing this bit!

We flip the edging over and...

hand stitch the binding in place allll the waaaay around. Yummy! Don't forget to neaten your corners and stitch them in place too.

Ta daa!

My totally thrifted quilt!

Well where ever Granny Pilley is now I hope she's pleased with what I've done.
She can rest safe in the knowledge that it will have a very happy and useful life here in the MarmaladeRose household and is already loved very much. As promised here is the tutorial I use to bind my quilts, beautifully written by a very talented lady who's blog is called 'Don't look now'.

Till next time

love fi x