trimming success(es)

one of my quilt room wishes is that i have a large cutting table covered in mats, large enough to trim my quilts on the table rather than on the floor like i do now. doing it on the floor at least allows me to be over the top of it when i'm cutting. 

but there's all the sliding around of the mat for each cut, the crawling along on my hands and knees, and worst of all, when i overshoot the mat and hit the tile with my rotary cutter. it ruins the blade every time.

not today! this time i was very careful with cutting on the mat and managed not to ruin my blade.

as i was lining up the rulers for cutting, i found the ease of lining up the rulers along the piece edges within the quilt refreshing. squaring up on a top that's already pretty square and has pieces that line up with your ruler nicely make the whole job faster and easier.

 

 i pulled out the binding options to make a final decision. originally, from the beginning, i planned to use the blue print with strings of lights as the binding. i hunted down another half yard of it after a lot of looking. when it arrived, i realized the print runs parallel to the selvage instead of perpendicular to it - the opposite of how i wanted it to make nice long cuts for binding. i started to worry i wouldn't have enough, too.

i auditioned a few other prints from my stash and decided i liked this birch tree on a goldenrod background. it wasn't part of the original pull the fabrics originally came from, but it worked well with them.

so when i pulled it out again, i intended to use it. but then i took another look at the blue lights print. i think it calms the quilt down where as the goldenrod energizes it. i like the calmer vibe with this quilt, so i opted for the original blue print after all.

once i had the quilt trimmed, i immediately processed and put away the trimmings from the backing. i was able to cut most of it into 1" and 1.5" strings. these are sizes i can use for various projects i have going.

i put them in the drawers designated for their sizes in my new scrap drawer tower. it felt so good to have everything dealt with and put away rather than lingering, languishing in some spot in the sewing room for ages as has previously happened with such pieces.

knowing what size scraps are useful to me and cutting for them is also so helpful. it makes putting pieces away for storage simple and more likely to happen, and it will make using the pieces more likely to happen, as well. win/win!

next up was making the binding. i made my first cut the wrong direction and winced. i did check first, but i thought it out wrong before i made the first cut. when i saw the piece and how the lights were lining up along it rather than across it, my brain immediately righted itself and i knew i'd done it incorrectly. ouch. i was already worried i wasn't going to have enough because of all the extra joining up (fabric loss) that would occur when using shorter pieces. i shrugged it off, telling myself i'd either work in the piece i cut wrong if i needed to, or i would add a strip of something else entirely. no use crying over spilt milk/cut fabric or worrying until i had it all complete and measured up on the quilt.

since i was short on fabric and because i wanted the design to be continuous without interrupting diagonal lines, i opted to join the binding strips end-to-end rather than with the diagonal joins i usually use. the design looked really good this way once sewn together. 

i got to wondering why it is i use the diagonal joins anyway? i never cut my binding on the bias. bias binding is where those diagonal joins come from, i think. the diagonal joins are probably more secure, but with the way my binding is double folded and then folded over again on the quilt edge, it seems unlikely there will be much stress on those little joining seams. maybe that's overdoing it? it certainly produces more waste with all those leftover triangles and requires more fabric to start with. i save my triangles for a scrap project, but are they even necessary?

well, all my worry about having enough fabric for the binding was for naught. even without that strip i cut wrong i had a whole extra strip leftover in length. i probably could have even done the diagonal joins and been fine. but i like the way it looks on this print better, so i'm glad i didn't.

all-in-all, it was a successful set of trimmings all the way around.