A Friday Finish - Christmas Table Runner & Binding Odd Angles

Whoop Whoop!  That's the sound of me doing the happy dance.  Please forgive yet another table runner post but I finished my project for the Modern Quilt Guild of Ireland swap on time.  It's been posted and should arrive to my swap partner today!  I'm so happy with how this turned out. 

Also forgive the indoor photo, I finished hand sewing the binding down at the last minute and have no daylight photos.  In Ireland at this time of year approaching the shortest day of the year it's dark until well after 8am and the sun is getting low in the sky around 3.30pm!

I had a devil of a time choosing binding for this that matched both the front and back.  I pulled all that I could from my stash and in the end decided that the front was more important and so I chose this white with light green dots to keep a bright clean feeling to the project. 

Another lesson learned.  Don't pick backing because it's Christmassy and I like the pattern!  This runner, that I designed putting 3 star blocks together, has angles greater than 90 degrees so mitred corners on the binding is a little different than squared edges.  I backstitched 1/4" away from the edge.

And then I found the easiest way to create the mitred corner was, to hold the straight edge I want to sew next straight ahead of me and fold the binding straight up lining up with edge of the quilt sandwich.

Then fold it straight down making sure the binding lies exactly on top of the first fold.

 You get a little pocket that when folded to the back gives a nice mitred finish.

I did this the whole way round, all the odd corners, and folded the binding back and held it in place with some clips.  Then I hand sewed the binding to the back of the runner.

It's fairly dotty but I like it!  We also had to put a small Christmas decoration in with our table runner so I crocheted a snowflake from the December edition of Simply Crochet magazine.

Crochet drives me bananas sometimes and I had to rip out round 4 three times but got there in the end!

So now they are all on the way to my swap partner.  Hope she likes them!  
Linking up to Finish it Friday and

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WIP Tablerunner for Christmas!

This is my 100th post - yay!  It almost feels like a birthday and there should be cake.  I'm amazed how quickly this came around and delighted to be posting a Wednesday Work in Progress for my 100th!

The Modern Quilt Guild of Ireland Swap deadline is this week so this weekend it was all guns blazing trying to quilt my Christmas table runner.  After staring at it for a week wondering how to go about this I eventually came up with outlining - yes it did take me a week to come up with that!

I did think about a fancy free motion continuous star pattern but I wasn't brave enough to try it on this so close to the deadline.  On the next runner I make for my mum I might just give it a go.  She likes the fabric in this so much she wants one for herself!

For straight line quilting I normally leave my machine settings at the default but I noticed on the beautiful swap mini quilt that I received from Christina over at Feeling Sew Blessed that she had used a longer stitch length and it really stood out so I googled for a bit and found other quilters liking 3.5-4 as a stich length so I tried that.  I really like the stitch definition and it is easier to rip out which thankfully I only had to do twice!

So quilting all finished, binding next!  Can't wait to finish and pop this in the post to my swap partner!  I love swaps.  This is my 3rd this year and each time I've learned something new.  This was a great project and I hope to be posting a finish for it on Friday.

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Star Crossing 12" block with 2.5" squares

I had great plans for today.  I planned to get my blocks for the Penny Sampler course and quilt we are making with Stitched in Color's Rachel.  But I had left out the scraps of Posy fabric I had generated from yesterday's Chevron blocks and I decided to cut them into 2.5" squares.

As I was cutting away I kept thinking of what they would be like on my star crossing block I had made in a 32" size last month.

A quick math's check told me I'd need 1.5" finished squares and HST to make a 12" block and yes I could get all the pieces needed from my scraps.  So that was that, I had to give it a go.

I made half square triangles from 2.5" squares and trimmed them to 2".  I'm not a big fan of trimming HST, for me its a matter of turning on the TV or radio and just getting on with it.  There's quite a few in this block as I didn't have enough scraps for flying geese for the centre sections and had to piece smaller squares.  Still it worked out grand with the exception of being short one of the white patterned squares so I used a square of Moda Bella white.  I read a great idea on a blog about adding in an embroidered signature or name so I'll do that to lift that bottom left corner square.

After all that hard work a cup of tea and a hobnob biscuit was in order!

All done.  I think the block works well in print as well as the solid I made last month.  I do wish I had used white for the dark pink squares as in my original design, but I was determined to use up scraps.  Up close it looks busy and very pink!  On the wall it looks ok to me.  Not sure what I'm going to do with just one 12.5" block!

Linking up to Design Wall Monday and Anything Goes Monday