Making progress and learning along the way

I know that I have not been offering much for you wonderful readers lately. I have had a lot of family distractions that have been consuming massive amounts of my time. The most significant of which is my daughter's wedding, which is on Saturday. She is in spaz mode these past few days, and I am trying to help keep her together and sane. My sanity, however, is definitely in danger. Eh, sanity is over rated anyways.

I have been sneaking in bits of quilting time whenever I can, but my progress is slow. Still, I am making headway on my nine-patch quilt. (The one that my last couple posts have been about. )I have decided I will share with you my experience with the quilting in sections method- the good, the bad, the ugly, and the darned near impossible. I am definitely learning as I go on this quilt.

This is one half of the quilt after it had been quilted.Notice that there are no borders attached at this point.The brown strip of fabric is just a preview of a border at this point.

This shows a close-up of the quilting.

When I layered this for quilting, I left extra backing fabric/batting space on three sides of each section of the quilt to accommodate the borders. Where the two sections would meet together, I left maybe a couple inches on each side. I trimmed one seam edge of the backing fabric down to 1.5 inches, and pressed the edge under. This will be a little fabric flap to cover the join on the back of the quilt.

On the second section, I trimmed the backing fabric down to extend past the quilt top around 3/4 of an inch. I also trimmed the batting down even with the center seam edge of the quilt top.Then I joined the two sections together along the center seam. Here is a view of the back of the quilt, with the fabric flap that covers the seam.
I used a fusible tape to hold the flap in place while I finish with the borders. I will hand stitch the flap down later.

Now the main body of the quilt is all one piece, quilted and ready for borders. Notice all of the extra batting and backing fabric around the edges. I plan stitch the borders onto the quilt next and then quilt them. I hope that goes as well as the rest of this has so far.

I loved being able to quilt two smaller and very manageable sections of the quilt. And I am happy that I will have fewer threads to bury, because most will be hidden once I add the borders. :)

Not everything has gone as planned with this process. There has been plenty of opportunity for learning so far. I miscalculated how large I needed the backing fabric on one half of the quilt, and now I will need to rethink my borders once again. Bummer. And I did not take into account the seam allowances when I stitched my quilting lines. This caused the diagonal quilting lines to skip at the joining seam.

See how nicely my seams line up? And see how the quilting through the nine-patches at the seam don't? Oh well, I am sure they are going to be off where they meet the borders too. But look how smart I'm getting! ;)