Quilt Reveals: Two Checker Cakes

I’ve got a few quilt reveals for you today. These are the two quilts I made during the Checker Cakes Quilt Along. If you missed this quilt along, you can still follow along with what we did each week. I have the posts for each week linked in the Quilt Alongs Page. This pattern is FREE, you can get it here.

I originally wrote this pattern to use up left over layer cake squares, but that was a little limiting. So, I decided to make some more options so more people could participate in the quilt along. You can check out those options in the Week 1 Blog Post from the Quilt Along. I ended up making an Option 2 and an Option 5 quilt during the quilt along.

Option 5

I’m sort of going out of order here, but this is actually the one that I finished first. Sometimes you have a quilt that decides to fight it’s existance. This one cooperated beautifully for being pieced, but it seemed to want to stay an unfinished top… It seemed to be really fighting me on getting finished. I suppose you wouldn’t know it by looking at it, looking so cute hanging on that fence.

The first fight this one put up was in the backing/quilting. Piecing the quadrant style backing went nicely as always. I do have a few instagram posts on that; Part 1 – Squaring the half yard cuts and Part 2 – Piecing the backing. So why was this step such a fight? I decided to quilt it with a decorative stitch along the seams line. I like to think of this as stitching over and around the ditch instead of ditch quilting. I talk a little more about this here.

I love how it turned out, but I ended up spending a little time with the seam ripper after I quilted the first few lines. It turns out that a little basting mistake got me here. My allignment of the backing seams with the seams of my quilt was a little off. That little off goes a long way when you use any variation of straight line quilting. With line quilting and a quadrant style pieced backing, this barely off looks painfully obvious. My decorative stitch straight line quilting was obviously not parallel with the seam lines in the backing. This misalligned backing wouldn’t have been noticeable at all if I’d free motion quilted it. Since free motion quilting is my default, this potential problem didn’t occur to me until it was too late. I noticed this after the first line I quilted, but I originally told myself I was just going to go with it. After a few more lines I decided I wasn’t going to be able to let this go and brought out the seam ripper. After seeing the final results, I’m glad I redid this even if I was thoroughly annoyed with myself while I was unpicking the stitches.

The binding was another point of struggle for me. I was intially thinking I was going to use my hybrid binding method (demo videos here and here). Then I thought I’d do traditional binding but slightly bigger, cut at 3″ strips like I use in my T-shirt quilts. So, I cut the 3″ strips and at the last minute, decided to go ahead and do the hybrid binding after all. One of the pros of my hybrid binding method is that you can use thinner strips to get the same size binding. So anyway, this made binding that was a lot bigger than I initially intended. Now that the quilt is finished, I like it. But, it’s not what I initally had in mind.

Option 2

I used all layer cake squares for this one. The high volumes were from a Moda Layer Cake and the low volumes were from a solid white layer cake. I am definitely a fan of scrappy backgrounds and scrappy low volumes, but I really enjoyed using a solid for the low volume squares in this quilt. This allowed me to use a lot of lighter colors in the high volume spots since they still contrasted nicely with the stark, solid white low volume squares.

I decided to use a solid navy blue for the backing with a light color quilting thread so that my quilting would show up really well on the backing similar to the affect I get with my T-shirt quilts. I took a highly scientific poll on instagram to see what color to quilt it in. Between a light pink, blue, and yellow, the blue won. I decided to free motion quilt this one with stipples. You can watch me working on this here. As usual, I used a decorative top stitch on my binding.

So, that’s my two quilts I made during my first quilt along! I know I’ve said this at least a few time before, but I am SEW thankful to everyone who joined me in my first quilt along. In my post next week, I’m going to be featuring some finished quilts made by quilt alongers! This will be another one of those posts with a heavy pictures to words ratio, perfect for people who just want to see a lot of pretty quilt pictures.

My next quilt along

I have another quilt along coming up this month. It starts October 23. We’ll be using my Sound Waves Baby Quilt pattern. It’s quick and easy. One of the main reasons I chose this one is becuase the top goes together so quickly. This will give me a little more time to devote some posts to helping you finish your quilt. You can sign up for this quilt along here. I’d love to have you join me in this one too!