Monday, September 1, 2014

QAYG - Part 2 - The Continuing Experiment

Hi everyone:

Happy Labour Day to all my Canadian readers. I hope you're still enjoying some summer-like weather and having a great day off!

I've been continuing my experiment with the QAYG techniques. My latest method is to piece the top to the batting only and add the backing and quilting after the top is done. While this is similar to the traditional method of piecing, it has one advantage: you don't have to pin the quilt top before you quilt it. Yay! I dislike pinning and usually use spray basting to construct my quilt sandwich. Hopefully this method would save me from spraying and pinning - and having to be outside or wear that respirator when I do it!

In this QAYG project, I am using a jelly roll to make a table runner: it's really just strip piecing. This is quite fast and I don't have to think too much about picking out fabric as it is already coordinated for me. I have adjusted the jelly rolls strips to add variety and will tell you about this in a future blogpost. 
I did start to do some straight line quilting in this project, but stopped and decided that I would do all over quilting when I have completely finished the top.

It's interesting how QAYG sucks up the batting and backing of the project (if you have the backing on at this stage). While I don't usually notice the quilting doing this on my regular projects, I really noticed it here, so having batting and  backing that is larger than the top is crucial with this method. I haven't yet squared (or rectangles in this case) up the top yet, but I can see that I've used up more of the batting than I had expected. Hopefully I won't have to trim the top down too much... just enough to even out all the edges.
Here are the advantages - and disadvantages - that I noticed when piecing the top and batting together and doing the quilting later:

PROS: 

  • Can do an overall quilt motif after the piecing is done, as in traditional piecing.
  • Could do a pillowcase binding method, rather than the traditional hand binding, potentially saving some time in that part of the project.
  • Using the pillowcase binding method makes it easy to add hanging tabs that are already stitched into your project when you add the backing.
CONS: 

  • Quilting is not done until after you've finished piecing, so this is more like constructing a traditional quilt top.
Have you tried QAYG? Let me know your thoughts on this process in the comments below.


Next week I'll tell you how I used a jelly roll to do the QAYG table runner and what adjustments I made while using it.

3 comments:

Colleen said...

I've done QAYG once, years ago, on a baby quilt. I didn't even know it was called that, then - I was just following the instructions on the pattern. I would like to try it again on a smaller project. Your tips and comments are very helpful!

Chatterbox Quilts said...

Thanks, Colleen! I'm having fun with it and may even finish the table runner. It's always good to try new techniques - even if we're not sure what exactly they're called :)

Chatterbox Quilts said...
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