Towards the start of this year I was hoping to host a Sew A-Long (SAL) series of blogs on my website Strictly Quilting. Well, sometimes life gets in the way by throwing the odd curve ball and I found things didn’t quite work out the way I’d planned. I’d started the design, based on star blocks, and slowly (very slowly) managed to get the design together.
As I’m sure you know, quilt blocks have a variety of names, frequently more than one, and I used blocks based on dessert names: French Silk Pie, Blueberry Pie and Peach Cobbler. I also added Love in the Mist and a few Friendship Stars as fillers. The whole quilt is now named ‘Galaxy’ and I am still planning on publishing it as a free SAL soon. (You can follow me on my website, Strictly Quilting, and get updated when I publish it, a block a week.)
I finally finished the quilt tops last week. One is made with a white background and a second with a black background. Both are ideal to use up scraps or can be made from meterage. The fabrics I used were from a selection of 10” square fabric samples from Makower, in rainbow colours. So now it came to layering and quilting.
Vlieseline sent this beautiful wadding for me to try and decided this would be the perfect project to trial it. As the wadding came out of the package, I was surprised at how beautifully soft it felt. The class of students that were with me at the time were all impressed by the feel with lots of ‘ohhhs’ and ‘ahhhs’ as it was passed around to feel. It drapes well and is, I have to say again, so soft! It’s got ‘body’, feels more substantial but is still lighter in loft meaning it’s not too puffy
The wadding is white, perfect for the white background quilt. If you use a cream wadding when you have white fabrics it can sometimes show through, making the pure white fabric a bit dull. Using a white wadding, you end up with a crisper white quilt.
The scrim holds it well and there doesn’t appear to be any bearding. This is when fibres from the wadding come away and you end up with them everywhere. (Think hairy dog getting fur all over the sofa! The scrim helps fix the fibres in place.)
For Free Motion Quilting, you can use two layers of wadding, so I layered up the backing, two layers of wadding and the top. Talking of backing fabric do you all do what I did? I was looking for the perfect backing fabric. Found a lovely, beautifully rich purple with gold highlights which was just too nice to use. I had to give myself a stern talking too! Anyway, using two layers of wadding means that when you knock back areas with heavier quilting, the un-quilted areas really stand out. I’d used a purple in the bobbin and a white thread on top. You can see a tiny hint of the bobbin thread which I’d intended to act as distant stars, similar to the Milky Way across the sky.
The wadding is washable, at 30 degrees and it does say that it should not be used in a tumble dryer. (That probably won’t stop me from throwing it in for a minute or two on a low setting to help fluff it up but please, follow the instructions rather than me!) The quilting distance is a recommended 10cm which might be a disadvantage to some. I was quite surprised to be honest, this isn’t a great distance when most modern waddings with scrim have a quilt distance of up to 10”, closer to 25cm. The difference doesn’t sound much but if you are a beginner, doing less quilting is quite appealing.
Overall, this wadding has a lovely feel, drapes well and is certainly one to keep in mind.
Strictly Quilting 