Snow Happy Hearts..... quilting progress....

As you may recall, at the end of last week I finished piecing my Snow Happy Heart Quilt. So, at the weekend I was keen to get started on the quilting.  I chose some backing fabric that I had in my stash (Northern Solitude by Holly Taylor for Moda) and pressed it carefully. It is a lovely green colour but the photo doesn't do it justice.

I selected some batting and measured, cut it and layered it on the backing fabric.  Then I very carefully laid the quilt top on the batting and backing and spent an hour or so hand basting them together.  I was eager to get started on the quilting and I was looking forward to some stitching time while I watched some television.

I usually hand quilt using a relatively big stitch and I don't hoop which works fine for small projects. However, things did not work out as planned.  I think the batting I used was thicker than normal plus, with the embroidered sections there was interfacing on some of the fabrics and, I just couldn't get my hand quilting stitches to look as I wanted them to.  I should probably add in here that I haven't hand quilted anything larger than a small wall hanging for some time, so I was probably also a bit out of practice!

I ended up taking out all the basting stitches, replacing the batting with a thinner piece and then tacking the layers together again.  To save time with the basting I used a tack gun. However, I still wasn't happy with the hand quilting stitches, so I unpicked the quilting that I had done and decided to try machine quilting instead.  I am not very well skilled at machine quilting but I thought I could manage some simple straight line quilting.

I started towards the middle of the quilt in the 'May' block and, have kept the quilting to a minimum as I want the quilt to have a natural look.

As the quilt top is fairly scrappy, I thought I would quilt in a scrappy fashion too.  I am just quilting each section with what I feel enhances that section.

Cross hatching squares, some stripes in some of the 'geese' and a few squiggles in the larger strips of fabric.

So far things are going quite well and I am quite happy with how it is looking. The back is also looking quite neat (if you don't look too closely!) so all in all perhaps a good decision.

Machine quilting is also a bit quicker, so I should have it all finished in time to hang it up with the Christmas decorations!  I hope to get some more quilting done this coming weekend!