More Robot Quilt News

It was the August quilting class on Saturday, a week earlier than normal due to the Festival Of Quilts. Unfortunately I won't be able to go this year but I'm hoping to get along to the Great Northern Quilt Show in Harrogate at the end of the month. I've not had much time in the last month to work on the quilt but Friday evening I felt I should make some progress before the class. The plan was to cut my scraps and sew sections for the next round of the border. Of course it didn't seem much more work to join the sections and sew them to the quilt, because I needed to know I'd made enough! Then it wasn't much more work to add the final border round so just after midnight I had this:

Robot sampler quilt top finished

I used random sizes and placement of the leftover scraps for the border. I didn't particularly enjoy making that bit. I realised once the 4 big strips were made that I should have thought more about what they would be next to on the quilt and had to turn one around.

At the quilting class I practiced some more free motion quilting as my plan is to do a lot of quilting on this one and I really need the practice!!! 

Yesterday I got some time to continue working on the quilt as the youngest child has chicken pox so we're stuck in the house. I didn't have enough of the sashing/border fabric for the back so I decided to use a blue fabric with dots on that I thought went well with the robot theme. Of course being a standard width fabric it was going to have to be pieced for the backing as it wasn't quite wide enough. Now I must confess that I have a slight hatred for piecing the backs of quilts if it's being done in one fabric. So I picked up my remaining scraps and cut some strips. I then cut those up into various lengths, I didn't even measure some. I sewed together enough to put 2 lines in the back.

At this point I had to stop working on it because I needed to buy some wadding. After much pondering over the different options and doing some sums to see what size offers the best value* I have ordered a cotton & bamboo blend. My first quilt was made with 100% bamboo wadding (the particular brand I bought has now been discontinued) and I loved it, so I'm interested to see how this blend compares.

 *A little note about the value aspect. The price is often given as a price per metre for a particular width OR as a price for a particular pack size. When trying to work out which is better value I always consider how much I need for the quilt I'm buying it for AND what size the leftover pieces will be. For example it may be that buying a larger width allows me to get a second quilt out of it but the smaller width would only give me small craft-sized pieces. Sometimes a pack has a width that is perfect for my needs where as the stuff sold by the metre would have a small width of wastage.