Trapunto, Quilting and Binding by Machine

At the moment I'm working on designing a wholecloth quilt for my college course. I've always loved traditional 'North Country' or 'Durham' quilts and longed to make one but haven't the patience or skill to hand quilt a big project. Mine will be machine quilted and I'm practising free motion quilting and other techniques such as trapunto. In the sample above the centre motif has two extra layers of wadding (80/20 Hobbs Heirloom) on top of a base layer which gives a very raised effect. I learned this technique from Philippa Naylor who uses it in her quilts.

I'm also trying out different bindings. On this next sample I tried a piped binding finished entirely on the machine!

Ricky Tims demonstrates this on his DVD 'Grand Finale'. I love it! It takes a little extra time to make the piping and mitre the corners but then there is no hand stitching to do. Although my sample isn't perfect by any means I definitely want to use this again.

I can't recommend Ricky's DVD highly enough because there is so much to learn on it. He demonstrates squaring the quilt, free motion quilting, using thicker threads in the bobbin, designing feather quilting designs, piped bindings and more. You can see him doing all of this on his Dragon Rhapsody quilt as well as on smaller samples. I know lots of people who think it's impossible  to use an ordinary sewing machine to quilt a full sized quilt but Ricky does just that on this video.

I have a long list of other design techniques and quilting styles to practise. I'm having fun working through them and I'm  getting much more confident in free motion quilting. It really does get easier with practice!