Matching or accent binding?

For years I used the same fabric for binding a quilt as I used in the last border.  It was a rule.  I don't know where I heard it or saw it or who came up with it, but it was a rule and I followed it.  Over the last few years I have pretty much thrown that "rule" out the window and started having fun with my binding choices.

Still, this weekend I chose to bind Patchwork Wishes in the same fabric as I used in the border.

Sewing binding on is pretty boring, so my mind tends to wander.  This time it wandered and wondered if there was any pattern to my binding choices. When do I choose matchy-matchy and when do I chose a contrast?  When I choose a contrasting binding, do I choose a reads-as-solid or a print?

I might have taken a small break to scroll through my quilt photos. Here are some trends I found in my quilts, complete with some brand new close-up photos of some bindings.

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Quilts without borders

When the "border" matches the background, or if there is no border, I usually choose a contrasting binding to act as a frame.  

Fabulous Phlox

Rush

Quilts with light borders

When a quilt has a light-colored borders, a darker binding adds a more solid edge to the quilt.  It also will show dirt less than a light binding would.

Boxed Kisses

Sprinkled

Quilts with pieced borders

When there's a lot happening in borders already, as in the case of a pieced border, a contrasting border might be one extra detail too many.  In the two quilts below, I used a matching binding to avoid pulling the eye away from the pretty pieced borders.

Positivity Squared

Prairie Mix

Quilts with prints in the border

I used fabrics that read more solid to corral the prints in the borders of these quilts.

Knotted

Crossings

Notice that Crossings also has a pieced inner border, so obviously the "matching binding when there's a pieced border" above is not a hard and fast rule!

Prints or Stripes for extra interest

Most of my quilts end up with a fairly plain binding, but every now and then the right print comes along to add a little pop.  

Sailing School

Saling School also belongs in the "quilt with no borders" category, but repeating a print from the quilt really kicked the binding up a notch.

Stripes can be stricky.  You need to find a striped print with colors that go really well with the fabrics in your quilt, but if you do, it can be really fun, like the diagonal stripe on Tic Tac Who - puppy version.

Tic Tac Who

A print binding against a solid border can also work.

Focus Squared

Repeating a border accent

Multiple borders with a binding that repeats the fabric from an inner border can emphasize the idea of the border as a frame.  It reminds me of a picture frame with molding.  You can see that in Focus Squared above, as well as in Starlight Plaid below.

Starlight Plaid

Scrappy quilts and other quilts with scrappy bindings

With busy scrappy quilts, I can go either way:  a quiet solid binding to contrast with the busy scrappy center, or a scrappy binding to embrace the scrappiness.

Quilter's scrapbook has a lot going on in the scrappy blocks, as well as the pieced border, so the red binding matching the border avoids adding one more element to the mix.

Quilter's Scrapbook

None of my pictures of scrappy quilts with scrappy bindings really show the binding well enough to illustrate.  My Temperature quilt isn't technically a scrap quilt, but it does have a scrappy look and the scrappy binding repeating all the colors works really well.

Temperature quilt

Temp quilt back - because this is a better picture of the scrappy binding :)

I also like to use up leftover strips if there are some several leftover after making a quilt top with precut 2 1/2" strips.

Star Chips

Matchy-matchy bindings

After all that analysis, you may wonder if I still use matching binding.  I do.  Not very often, but I do.  Genrerally, I'll use binding that matches the border if there's a lot happening visually in the rest of the quilt and I feel it doesn't need to have yet another element stand out.  That was the case for Patchwork Wishes which I bound this weekend.

Patchwork Wishes - pattern release coming soon!

(Patchwork Wishes will get it's very own post soon!  Stay tuned.)

Tell me about your binding choices. Do you have any guidelines you follow?  Do you like your binding to fade into the background or pop with color?  Any favourite successes or some you wish you had chosen differently?

Happpy quilting,

Joanne

PS: You can read about how I machine bind my quilts here.

Tic Tac Meow and Robin

I finished Tic Tac Meow. Thank you for all the suggestions about cat placement.  Clearly, I have not been around cats enough.  Apparently, some of the X blocks would have been scattered or askew if they had truly been around a cat.  I really didn't feel like ripping and rearranging though, so things are rather more orderly than a true cat would have allowed, but here it is.

Tic Tac Meow

I didn't want any quilting on the Cuddle fabric.  I wanted an uninterrupted soft furry surface for the cat, but that would have left too large an unquilted space under the cat.  (I used Hobbs Heirloom 80/20 blend batting and it specifies quilting no more than 4 inches apart.)  To get the effect I wanted I quilted the quilt before adding the cat, and just stitched though all the layers to sew the cat on afterwards.  I hope that survives multiple washings!

I couldn't resist the striped binding.  I'm glad I had blogged about joining diagonal stripes on the bias when making striped binding, because I couldn't remember how to cut the strips to hide the seams where strips join.  I'm glad I didn't have to waste any fabric to figure it out again.  I just love this red stripe and am trying to make it last!

I found the perfect backing too.  Look at those little whiskered cat faces!

I almost hate to let it go, but this quilt will be on its way to its new home soon.

I'll still have a little bit of it though. I cut out more squares than I needed for the quilt so that I could audition the fabric and fabric positions.  I also had waste triangles from the stitch-and-flip corners.  Finally, I had an extra cat silhouette, cut out to fit in one block before I decided I wanted the cat to have more presence.

The leftovers all fit quite nicely into this little piece..  I have decided it will be the center of my round-robin quilt at guild so I'm naming the cat Robin .  We will pass our centers along for the first round of borders in a couple of weeks then it will be several months before I see how the quilt turns out.  I have lots of ideas for borders but the fun will be to see what my group partners will come up with instead.  I'm rather impatient to see, and we haven't even started yet.  I think I'm going to have to develop a little bit of patience!

Tic Tac Meow auditions

I am playing with my Tic Tac Who? pattern this week, but the family I am making the quilt for are cat people.  Rosie isn't sure she approves of this cat business, but I am adding an applique cat instead of my pieced dog block anyway.  I chose a black cat silhouette pattern from the EQ8 block library and will cut it from black Cuddle fabric once I settle on a size.

My original idea was to simply applique the cat on a blank square where the pieced dog/owl/duck block is in the original pattern.

Umm.  Nope.  This applique just doesn't fill the space the way the pieced blocks did.  The cat shape is perfect though, so I'm determined to use it somehow.  I had been so sure this would work that I cut this cat from Cuddle, so I have an applique cat block to play with in some other project now.  However, I am not cutting any more cuddle without auditioning with something less messy first.  There's cuddle fuzz everywhere!

My husband suggested a sheet of cheap poster board. Why didn't I think of that? I cut a larger cat silhouette from poster board and have been auditioning placement.  I don't have a photo of the first try, but it did lead me to fill in the blank block with another X instead of trying to plunk a cat in it.

I think the size is better, but I don't like having the cat pretty much in the center of the quilt.

This is a bit better, but I think the cat gets a bit lost against the darker reds.  There's something else bothering me about this one, but I can't quite put my finger on what exactly.

Maybe.

I think I like this one best.  I am going to let that simmer for a little bit while I baste and quilt the quilt.  I plan to have the cat be just a silouhette, so I don't want to quilt inside or all over it, but it is too big to leave the area under it unquilted.  I am going to quilt the background, then applique the cat on top.  I think that should be OK. If you have any words of wisdom against that plan, please speak now before I quilt!

Thanks for sharing!

Every now and then I wonder why I keep writing patterns.  I'm sure my very supportive husband has also wondered when I treat him to rants about a design I really like not finding traction out in the wide world, or about being so tired of that pattern I've been working on forever (love the quilt, but the pattern isn't flowing as it should yet) or about that last magazine rejection.

Then, to balance things out, every now and then I also get lovely messages from quilters who have made quilts with my patterns and kindly share pictures of their creations.  They truly lift my spirits and encourage me to keep working.

Anita in Ottawa shared her beautiful version of my Spring Blooms quilt (I shared the block tutorial here).  I love seeing alternate versions of my designs.  Anita chose very different fabrics and chose a straight setting instead of an on-point setting. Same blocks, very different quilt! I'm very late sharing this picture.  Anita sent me this last spring and I saved it in the wrong folder and couldn't find it again.  I'm so glad I finally stumbled into the correct folder!

Anita's Spring Blooms

Mary M. made Geese Across the Table placemats.  I love her color choices.  She chose to make them less scrappy than mine and I think that worked out very well.
  

Mary's Geese Across the Table

Mary also made a version of Tic Tac Who? for her grandchild, choosing to make the puppy a Labradoodle like the family dog.  Works for me!

Mary's Tic Tac Who?

Here is Sue Zimmerman's Snow Dreams tree skirt, which she finished in time for Christmas.  It was her first ever paper pieced project! Nothing like jumping in with both feet, but she did a fabulous job. Nancy Troyer quilted it for her.

Sue Zimmerman's Snow Dreams

And Marilyn F. shared her Canada 150 quilt.  Check out the fun pieced back as well, with a pieced label about her participation in both Canada's 100th and 150th anniversary celebrations.

Marilyn's Canada 150 quilt

Thank you for sharing and for the encouragement, ladies! I'm off to work on a new pattern!

Tic Tac Who? pattern release!

Here it is! Tic Tac Who? is a pattern!

My Tic Tac Who pattern is now available for sale in my Payhip and Craftsy shops, and will be available to quilt shops through distributors sometime in January. 

The simple X blocks and plain squares are a perfect balance for the more involved focus blocks.  The focus blocks add just a touch of challenge, but don't require cutting any triangles or any paper piecing.  You can see versions with all three blocks in past posts:  duck, puppy and owl.

I owe a huge thank you to my wonderful testers, who volunteered to make blocks or a full quilt and offered lots of useful feedback.  I hope you will click through to view their versions on their blogs or Instagram.  I love seeing the designs come alive in different fabric choices!

Janet Olsen- Rogue Quilter

Andrée Faubert- Quilting and Learning

Lissa La Greca - Lovingly Lissa

Sandra Walker - Musings of a Menopausal Melon

 Marlene Scobbie - Cats and Capers

Sherill Pecere, Lorna Comeau and Elaine Williamson also tested for me.  Though I don't have links, I want you to see their work as well.

This and That

It has been a busy few weeks and though I emailed the winners of my giveaway I didn't get a blog post up recognizing them as I had planned.  Let me correct that oversight now.

Vicki of Vicki's Crafts and Quilting won a copy of Wandering Geese

Karen of KaHolly won a copy of Autumn Moons

Ariane of Ariane Quilts won a copy of Snow Dreams

Elively won a copy of Quilter's Scrapbook

So, what have I been up to?  There has been baking.  Here's the fruitcake fruit mixture bubbling on the stove, defying gravity, apparently.  Gotta love those sideways loading pictures.

I tried not making fruitcake last year and there were sad faces.  Yes, some people do like fruitcake!  Or maybe just this particular recipe.  In any case, those family members that requested it are getting some in their Christmas parcels this year.  My brother gets cookies too - though if I don't get them packaged and mailed soon there won't be any left to send in time for Christmas arrival!

There has been a bit of sewing.  I'm late to the party but I am finally making some of the microwaveable bowl cozies that became very popular a few years ago.  

My daughter tried the first one out in the microwave to heat up her lunch today, and it worked like a charm.  If you do make some, remember to use only 100% cotton materials, and only use them to reheat foods for a short amount of time.  Cotton will heat up in the microwave, and it will ignite if you leave it in long enough to get hot enough.  Heating up a bowl of soup or leftovers for a couple of minutes seems to work fine - but as with all cooking, don't leave it unattended!

There has also been work at the quilt shop, tweaking my Tic Tac Who? pattern to address suggestions by my kind, capable and very appreciated pattern testers, pondering a Block of the Month program using my snowflake blocks (stay tuned!)...and other stuff but I won't bore you with a whole list!  Just busy.

In between things, I have been working away cutting all the pieces for my daughter's Chic Country quilt.  It's slow going.  I got most of the squares and rectangles cut out, then decided to tweak things just a bit so needed to figure out how that affected my part counts.  I got that sorted out and moved on to cutting the curved pieces out of all the squares and rectangles. I think I'm about half done.

I'm hoping she won't have moved on to new favourite colours before this quilt is finished.  We picked out these fabrics last February!  Did I mention I plan to make this my next hand quilting project?  There is probably at least a year's worth of work still to go...

Tic Tac Hoot!

Tic Tac Hoot was the last Tic Tac Who? quilt I designed.  I had the other two finished when my daughter suggested an owl version.  I love owls!  I think it dates back to being a Brownie leader in Halifax in university.  My leader name was Sleepy Owl. It's a long story, but I promise I was wide awake and enthusiastic!

Tic Tac Hoot

Tic Tac Hoot turned out very well in the end, after a very slow start!  My first attempt at designing an owl yielded something that looked more like a bat, and definitely wasn't baby-cute.

Imagine this guy in black and you've got a bat!

I tweaked a little and came up with something I thought would work so I stitched him up in fabric.

Oh, that beak! This looked more like an owl but something was off, so I tried again.

I was getting closer to a finish!  I popped him into the quilt layout on the design wall...

I really thought the green background and the darker sashing would work, but once it was on the wall, I couldn't bring myself to start sewing everything together. It stayed up on the wall a few days, and still I didn't want to sew it up, which was a pretty good sign that I wouldn't be happy with it this way.

I decided that the green background behind the owl was the problem. It didn't "float" the owl on the quilt and it interrupted the diagonal of floating blocks created by the X blocks.  Also, it doesn't seem so in the photo above, but the X blocks disappeared a bit on that darker background.  Back to the shop I went, to buy the fabric I had briefly considered for the sashing and discarded as too bland.  I also chose slightly lighter browns for the owl.

Final version of owl block

Much better!  The lighter sashing/background softened up the look.

Tic Tac Hoot quilting 

Again, I quilted with my walking foot.  The owl is stitched in the ditch. For the rest of the quilt I started an all-over design, but didn't like how it played with the quilt as a whole.  Next I tried circles, then decided to do squares instead, then picked out the 7 squares I had finished and went back to circles!  Oh, and I found a spot where I had picked out a seam to fix some alignment then somehow missed re-sewing part of it.  Really?  I practiced a little bit of hand stitching to fix that little oops.

I think you get the idea that this quilt made me work a little harder than the other two!  It isn't a harder design.  I guess I was just due for a few quilting hiccups.

I was very happy to finally get the binding on.  That part went smoothly at least!  I love these little green dots, and the brown and leaf print for the backing.

Now all that's left to do is to finish the pattern!  Almost done. If all goes well, I'll be sending out to testers by the end of the week.

Tic Tac Quack!

It's Tic Tac Quack's turn today.  This one has the easiest focus block of the three Tic Tac Who? quilts.

Tic Tac Quack

You might remember my first rubber duck block attempt yielded a rather chubby duck. I'm glad I went back to the drawing board.  This one fits the space just as I hoped.

 

I tried to quilt random wavy lines for the waves.  I've seen lovely quilting like that, but whatever I was doing didn't do the trick.  It looked like one big mess.  I ended up ripping out the quilting (I quit after finishing about a quarter of the quilt, so it didn't take to long to rip out) and starting over after marking lines.  I used a flexible curve, the kind used in drafting I think, to copy the curve.  This, like most of my quilts, was quilted with a walking foot.

I don't know if you can make out the detail in the binding.  I used the same bubble print as in the square right below the duck. It reminds me of bubble bath.  When my kids were little, rubber ducks and bubble bath were a great bath time team.

Have a great weekend!  I hope you'll drop in to see Tic Tac Hoot! in more detail tomorrow.