Binding, Binding and More Binding

I made good progress today. First order of business was sewing down the binding strips over the joins between blocks. There are some similarities to the way the binding was applied over the cutout joins: binding used on one side is wider then on the other, the bobbin thread is visible as a sort of echo quilting line and the edges are topstitching. So my green thread is on top and the yellow in the bobbin. Instead of the wide binding being on the back side, now it is on the front, centered over the join. Here I've stitched down one side and am stitching along the other side.

Once all joins in the row have been covered, the row is flipped over and the narrower binding centered between the lines of stitching attaching the binding on the top.

Then it is topstitched just like on the front.

The bobbin thread becomes a second line of stitching on the top binding. As you can see, keeping everything lined up and even is important but difficult to do. So much depends on the accuracy of the folds in the binding and evenness of stitching along the edges.

Once all binding is applied front and back to the rows, the rows are butted together and zigzagged. It's necessary to somehow hold them in place and the painter's tape just didn't have enough stick to it. As soon as I would pick up the piece to put it in the machine, the tape would give way. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I could pin through the tape; where tape or pin alone would not work, the two together did.

If a lot of changing of thread had not been required, I probably would have applied the long pieces of binding along the row joins while the quilt was still in sections. Instead, I zigzagged all the rows together. Here you can see three rows already joined. I joined the last two rows together, then added them to the other section.

In order to run these two big sections through the machine, I had to make a neat little package by rolling both sides in towards the seam to be stitched, and then rolling up the bottom as well.

Here you can see the pinned binding over each join on top. I'm liking what the plain pink binding as sashing is doing to give unity to my disparate group of fabrics.

Once all the binding was pinned in place, I rolled the quilt into a nice package the same as when I zigzagged the last join. This is as far as I got today. I think this last step will go fairly quickly. As each piece of binding gets stitched, I'll re-roll to expose the next piece of binding waiting to be topstitched. When the top is done, I'll flipped it to the back, pin the remaining binding on, roll as before and stitch it as I did the binding between the blocks.