Honeycomb piecing is done!

I've always wanted to take a picture of one of my quilts on a wooden fence.

Trying to do it by myself is difficult, especially with a tiny breeze easily flipping the single layer of fabric.  Yes, it's just a quilt top, and is going to be added to the to-be-quilted pile for a later date.

But I consider it a "done" for now!

Pieced by Naomi Perry from the Honeycomb quilt pattern by Karen Griska.

It doesn't look very big laid out on the floor. 

Pieced by Naomi Perry from the Honeycomb quilt pattern by Karen Griska.

I like having it out of the sewing room 😀. 

Feels like it's getting to see the "light of day" instead of being cooped in the sewing room.

(The picture on the fence was taken right after this.)

Oh, I'm so in love with it!! 😍 

Pieced by Naomi Perry from the Honeycomb quilt pattern by Karen Griska.

Ok! Now that I've celebrated this finish, I'm gonna take a tiny step back.

One thing I wanted to tell you is about what can sometimes happen when cutting borders.  

If you have to fold the fabric and cut, and the fold is slightly off, the strip is going to do a bit of a zig-zag. You can see how far the strip on the left bows to the left.

If you try to use that strip, it's going to cause a ripple in the border. 

See that bump where I'm pointing? This will cause more and more trouble as borders are added, making the quilt top ripple and difficult to square up at the end. There are other things that cause rippling, on this day this is the issue I had. 

 

There are a bunch of "how to put a border on your quilt" tutorials out there already.

I'm gonna give the quick quick look at how I attach borders.

 After I have made sure all my strips are straight, I get the measurement of the length of the quilt through the middle and the edges.  I leave an inch extra at each end so that I can be sure to have enough fabric to trim squarely. (Sometimes, if that end isn't cut straight or if the seam was off slightly, it could result in being a little short. So I prefer to trim after each side is attached, just in case.)

I mark both ends and the center with a pin (or a pencil mark).

If my top had a bit of rippling at this point, I would have added more registration marks, to be sure there wouldn't be stretching while sewing. 

This time my quilt top was nearly perfectly flat ( I was so happy!!)

I pinned the center mark on the border to the center of the quilt top...

And made sure the edge marks were right at the edge of the quilt top.

Everything was nice and flat and fit perfectly together. I added more pins to make sure it would stay that way while I sewed.

I fed this through the machine with the border up. The idea is that the pieced side will have more give and will tend to stretch.  Having the pieced side on the bottom will allow the feed dogs to grip the fabric and keep it moving through evenly.

I sew from pin to pin and assess each section separately. A little bit of tension can be added while holding onto the next pin if there's a little extra fabric on one side or the other. But if that extra is more than a 1/4 inch, it's going to cause rippling. I would remove the top from the machine and re-evaluate the measurements and see where the correction needs to be made.

However, everything worked perfectly on this top!! ❤

Repeat the whole process for the top and bottom strips, and then for all remaining borders.

Two inner borders, a stripped pieced border and an outer triangles border! Phew!

It all went together so well, I didn't think to take more pictures with each border!
And now it's DONE!

The design wall is empty again... what will go up next??