This week my quilt “Girls’ Room” or as I’ve sometimes called it “Sisters’ Room,” is on display in Hitachi, Japan. The city of Birmingham, Alabama and its sister city, Hitachi, trade quilts for one another’s quilt shows. This year I let Japan borrow my quilt for display. I also made a large pillow to go with the quilt, but decided against sending the pillow too. I wasn’t sure they’d have a place for it and didn’t want it to get lost. Regardless, this was a big thing for me personally. I hope the people in Japan enjoy seeing beautiful quilts from Alabama.

The quilt is made with cotton fabrics, mostly from Brenda Riddle’s “Windemere” line. (It’s my favorite fabric pattern of all time!) The background is a natural color from Moda and it’s sewn with Aurifil thread. The pattern is Cake Mix #2 from Miss Rosie’s Quilt Co/Moda. It is a variation of the bear claw/bear paw pattern and when used with these fabrics makes a soft look and feel.

The most difficult part of the quilt was that I ran out of 10″ stackers and had to improvise with the 5″ and try to stretch them out to fill in gaps. I had a particular size I wanted in mind, and I didn’t want to have to buy another layer cake (10″ stack) when I had charms (5″) in the same pattern. It was a test of my sanity but I made it work.

The scalloped edges were something I really wanted to try. If you don’t know me, you should know that math is not my friend. So there were a lot of marks with my water soluble pen that were “erased” and marked over and over and over until I was happy with the corners and spacing.

Another thing quilters don’t get enough attention for is bias binding. To those who don’t quilt, let me explain. You may think all the edges of quilts are the same. No, my friend, they aren’t! Bias binding is when you cut strips of fabric on the bias (angular) and then sew them together before putting them on your quilt, usually for rounded corners or circular quilts. It is much harder because when cut on the bias, it stretches. That’s the beauty of it too, I agree. So what happens if you use straight cut strips for binding? They will bunch up and have waves in it. It usually doesn’t lay the same way and is almost impossible to go over shapes like scallops.

I learned a lot with this one, and I hope the people of Hitachi are enjoying it too. I have a number of projects in the works, so I’ll try to be better about sharing them with you too!

Beth