Spring Bargello borders done

Good idea………… leave all those dreaded jobs for when a friend comes over to quilt with you. Had Karin over on Friday night to help me stay awake and we started quilting at 7pm and worked right through the night until 5 am the Saturday morning and yes, I got all those appliqué motifs satin stitched to the background. Even with her here it didn’t make me enjoy the process more, so we took plenty of breaks watching quilt videos on QNN TV and got plenty of tips and saw pretty cool things. However watching these made us realize just how deprived South African quilters are, we get to see so much but get so little over here. Luckily we have people like Kelly from IHAN not scared to send her stock anywhere in the world.


The next step was to put some emphasis on my appliqué motifs with trapunto. I simply spray basted (505 Spray adhesive) a batting strip behind the appliqué motifs and then used monofilament thread on top to stitch as close to the motifs as I could.

Before cutting the batting away and with the comfort of still having the strips separated from the top I’ve added some decorative free-motion stitching to the appliqué motifs with Catsidy keeping a watchful eye on my work.

Spray basting turned out to be a very bad idea as I had a hard time separating the batting from the fabric especially in the smaller areas where I did the stitching and I ended up snipping through my top fabric. See where the tip of the scissors disappears in the fabric. I then had to cut, iron and satin stitch 4 more leaves to make both borders look the same.

With the batting cut away it is finally time to trim the borders to size and add these to the quilt top.