Happy baby quilt - Part three

This is the final post in my Happy baby quilt series. I hope my musings help anyone wishing to venture in some quilting. You can read the first post here and the second post here.

It's amazing how you can be both excited and scared about a project from beginning to end! Quilting this baby quilt was one such project. 

Once I had the top of the quilt ready, time has come to join it to the batting and backing, with a little bit of binding, that simple (not to me) technique! 

I layered the backing, batting and quilt top as neatly as I could and began the long and slow process that is pinning it all together. With what felt like the greatest of cares to me, I moved the whole 'sandwich' to my sewing machine and slowly quilted the three layers together. I did a straight line to the left of the columns and the same on the top of the rows, using yellow thread and a walking foot (great little thing!).

I then made my binding from yellow fabric. Binding really makes or breaks a quilt and I believe the yellow binding was the final push for my happy quilt. I cut 2.5" strips and used this tutorial to make my bias tape.

I knew I wanted to machine bind my quilt from the word go, for two reasons: 1. I wanted to be 100% sure the quilt would survive heavy use (I'm hoping it gets so heavily used the fabric goes thin!); and 2. it is a much quicker way of binding and time was (is?) precious.  

I looked around for machine binding tutorials; you can tell I put a lot of emphasis on this. For me, the binding really is key to the whole process and I wanted to do it properly. I found a very good tutorial for machine binding which added the stitching as a feature rather than trying to hide it by doing it absolutely perfectly. I love how it turned out and will definitely use this method again!

Hope you've found this short quilting series helpful and... happy :)

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You can read Part 1 of my Happy quilt series here and Part 2 here.