Adding lights to light up your quilt!

Finishing the quilt

Yesterday post I showed you how to put your Halloween quilt top together. Now, let’s get it finished!

Layer backing fabric, batting and quilt top, making sure to center the quilt top on the backing.

Baste the layers together. Quilt as desired. Trim excess backing and batting to square-up the quilt top.

If you’re going to add lights to the border, you need to make a pocket for the battery pack before you put on the binding. Here’s how to do it.

1. From left-over backing fabric, cut a 5½” x 10″ rectangle. Fold the rectangle in half, right sides together.

2. Stitch along the 2 sides as shown in the diagram.

3. Turn right sides out. Press.

4. Top-stitch along the three closed sides, approximately ⅜” from the edges of the fabric.

5. Center the pocket on the back of the quilt, aligning raw edge of pocket with raw edge of quilt.
Hand-stitch the two side edges in place.

6. After the binding is finished, you can insert the battery pack in the pocket.

And now it’s time for the binding. I like to make a ½” finished size binding. Have a look at my QUILTsocial post from August 11 to see how to make this binding.You’ll be using the 5 – 3″ green strips that were cut earlier.

To make your quilt really sparkle, you can add a battery-operated light kit. These lights are available from Northcott Fabric through your local quilt shop.

Machine-stitch a small, free-motion circle in each place on the border where you would like to put a light. Each circle should be approximately ½”. Note: It’s a good idea to do a couple of practice circles before working on the quilt. Check the size of the light before making the circles. You may have to adjust the size of the circles.

Snip a small hole in the center of each circle.

When the binding has been completed, you can insert a light into each hole from the back of the quilt.

You can find out which shops have these lights by clicking here.

You can watch a video of the process by clicking here.

Come back tomorrow, and I’ll show you how to use the stripe that was cut from the panel, along with a few more fabrics from the Northcott Happy Halloween collection, to make a fun Halloween pillowcase.