Canvas fabrics from Northcott the right choice of a soft colored quilt

Over the past 4 days we’ve completed a quilt top by making hundreds of HSTs and QSTs! The 6 vibrantly-colored fabrics from the Northcott Canvas line I chose, make it easy to create a cheerful quilt to banish the January blahs.

Yesterday I promised you a surprise and the big reveal is just at the end of this post!

The vibrant Northcott Canvas fabric used to make a variation on the Ohio Star Block quilt.

Now that the quilt top is completed, it’s time to get it ready for quilting.

Quilt Backing

Among the great variety of fabrics in my stash, the one type I don’t have is wide-back. The reason for this is that I have way more fabric than I can ever use, so I try to use up the yardage I have before getting more!

With our quilt measuring 84½” x 84½” and using fabric with an average width of 40” to 42”, I knew that even if I sewed 2 pieces of fabric together edge to edge, it still wouldn’t be enough width to span the back of the quilt top.

Knowing that my long-arm quilter, Kim Mullen of Eye Candy Custom Quilting, wanted a backing measuring 8” longer and 8” wider than the quilt top, I knew I had to find a way to make the backing the required size. I needed more width!

Necessity is the mother of invention, or so they say! Well, I remembered all the part strips that were left over from cutting the quilt top and decided to sew them end to end. Problem solved! I got my width!

Backing with pieced strip in center to provide width.

Batting

The batting I used is FAIRFIELD Low-Loft® Quilt Batting – Queen – 228 x 275cm (90″ x 108″). It’s a polyester batting, so, it won’t shrink and will dry quickly after washing.

FAIRFIELD Low-Loft® Quilt Batting – Queen

Once the quilt backing was suitably widened and prepared and the batting selected, everything was sent to my longarm quilter, Kim. The quilt was loaded onto the longarm machine, look at how beautiful it looks!

Quilt top and backing prepared for quilting.

Binding

The last step is to add the binding.

To give the outer edge a bit of pop I decided to use Northcott Canvas green 9030-76. You should have already cut eight 2½” strip for the binding on day one of this week’s posts!

As we did yesterday with the outer border, all the strips need to be sewn short edge to short edge. Use your preferred method to do this:

• straight edge seams or

• edges sewn on a 45^o angle.

In my opinion, for binding, the 45^o angle method looks better. The reason? With seams pressed open, the bulk of the seam will be spread out over 2½”. If you use the edge to edge method, a lot of bulk will be concentrated in an area that will be at most ½” wide.

2 different methods to sew strips together.

With the binding strips sewn together, the long strip must now be sewn to the edge of quilt top by machine then finished off by hand.

Binding sewn to quilt top.

What a great week we’ve had!

From selecting, cutting and sewing the fabrics, to having Kim machine-quilt and quilt bound, I’m happy to announce that the quilt is now completed!

As promised here’s the reveal!

Ta-Da! The finished quilt using Northcott Canvas fabrics

Quilt made with a variation of the Ohio Star block using Northcott Canvas fabrics.

It sure was a fun week going back to basics and making a traditional pattern. What I loved about this week’s project was using the vibrant colors of Northcott Canvas fabric line. They really gave a fresh and soft look to the quilt in the middle of winter.

I do hope that you had fun making this week’s quilt. Come on back next week to learn more new techniques!