Terry Aske Art Quilt Studio

My new art quilt ‘W and the 3 Bridges‘ is completed!  The finished size is 14.5″ x 27″.

In making this quilt I experimented with several new-to-me techniques.

I constructed the background (sky and water) with raw edges.  I usually fuse all my fabrics and cut them to precise shapes.  I like how the raw edges and freehand cut shapes give the background a softer look – even though I did have to trim some fraying threads from time to time.   See more about how I constructed the background in this post.

I traced my design onto sheer fusible interfacing, and used it for two purposes – as an overlay to position the fused bridge pieces, and as a guide for stitching the detail lines on the bridges.  See these posts for more information – Bridge 1, Bridge 2, Bridge 3.

I was planning to use white eco-felt for batting, but didn’t have enough on hand.  So I used Warm & White batting, and I’m really pleased with how flat it is.

I did all my quilting with no backing fabric – quilting through the top and a layer of batting.  This allowed me to easily add more quilting wherever I wanted to, without any concern of how messy it might look on the back.

Once all the quilting was done, I fused the backing on.  I fused Heat n Bond Lite to the backing fabric.  (I bought this fusible quite a while ago, but haven’t used much of it because I much prefer Steam a Seam Lite).   I trimmed the fused backing to 1″ shorter and narrower than the trimmed quilt, so that about 1/2″ of the quilt showed on each edge.  I did this so it would be easier to turn the edges to the back when I applied the facings.

I considered doing some minimal quilting through all the layers including the fused backing, but decided not to.  I want to see how this works.  If the bond holds, additional quilting should be unnecessary.  I can always add some quilting later, if I decide it’s required.

I used my standard facing technique, but with a couple of twists.

On more than one occasion, I have cut too much of the batting from the corners.  So this time, I sewed the side facings and pressed them, then finger pressed the bottom edge to figure out exactly how big a triangle I should cut from the batting.  After cutting off the corners of the batting, I attached the bottom facing.  I then cut the same size triangle from the top corners of the batting.

I usually hand-sew the facings to the back of the quilt, but decided to fuse the facings.  I used 1/2 inch fusible tape.  First I fused the side facings in place, then the top and bottom facings.  I’m happy with how this looks, and it was much quicker than hand-sewing.

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