Charity Quilt Quilting Progress

Here is where I am on my goal of getting 120 quilts quilted for charity in 2024. I waited a bit long this year, but I was having so much fun making house quilts earlier that I didn’t want to stop and focus on anything else. Yes, that is the truth.

But now I have finished quilting 45 quilts.

Here are some pictures from my process. I sometimes take pictures as I am quilting, but naturally I don’t think of taking photos of most of them. Sorry. I’m just focused on getting them done and not photographing. Things take longer when you have to think about taking pictures, much less video.

You can click on the arrow to go to the next quilt in progress.

I have been working through many of those strip quilt tops I finished up last year. Ewa (Eva) had made so many rolls of strips that I made them into tops and tops - quite a few of them. Below I’m showing you one of them below once the tops were made from those strips.

I am not going to use all of them up in my 120 quilts this year as I don’t want all the quilts to be the same, but I may use 30 or so of this type. I do make the backings different and a variety of them so there is always something for everyone.

I wanted to show you the huge Jerusalem puzzle that my husband framed and we put in my long arm room. It is so beautiful! If I remember right, it is 3000 pieces.

I did have a lot of already precut backings. I can see that once I finish up this year I do want to precut a lot more of them as it does make it so much faster once I am on a roll of getting these tops quilted.

As to trimming and binding.

For now I have trimmed 20 quilts.

Most of the time I do use my very large Kai scissors to do it. With poly batting, I find it easier to use the scissors rather than the rotary cutter.

With cotton batting, it really is just fine with the rotary cutter. I find the width/depth of the poly batting just makes it a bit harder to use the rotary cutter.

Of course, I could use the rotary cutter for either cotton or poly. I just find it faster to use the large scissors. If I don’t try to do too many at once, my hand doesn’t start to hurt!

That pile of strips is a long length of bias stripes that I can use. I came across them when going through fabrics to trim up.

I have a whole bag of binding ready to use - but so far haven’t bound any. I will start picking out combinations of fabrics and get going on a couple of them pretty soon.

I do want to get started on binding at least a few of them so I can spread it out the binding part a bit. The advantage of binding at the end is that I can get in a groove and bind similar ones together so that I don’t have to change the color of the thread much, or find more binding.

For example, if I know I am going to do 3 quilts in the same binding, I just collect them all the same color and make them. I am doing a lot of these as scrappy bindings these days in order to use up a LOT of my 2.5” strips. It is really a wonderful way to use up these bags and bags of already cut up strips. I can just look at the colors in each quilt and make a binding from those strips. It does take a bit more time than using just regular yardage and cutting, but I think it is worth it to use up these pieces. It also looks cool, I think.

I did create a sheet of paper for my own use to keep me going. I put a box for each quilt I need to do and will be marking them off as I get through each process. i”m starting with a red line for quilting and a blue line the other direction for trimming. I’ll be coloring in sections for binding then washing/photographing until the whole thing is colored in. I know…it’s silly, but it’s for me - to keep me motivated and going hard at this.

And that’s it. Thanks so much for coming along with me on this journey!

Have a great day wherever you are reading this!

Becky Petersen3 Comments