2024-12-10
Finished quilt, with cat

LE BOUQUET FRANÇAIS QUILT: Quilting & Binding

I put this quilt aside for a while because making pandemic masks seemed rather more pressing. I recently had a bit of time to pick it up and finish it.

The batting is a polar-fleece throw, one of a pile I bought from Lands’ End when the combination of a sale and a promo code brought them down to about C$8. It makes for a nice light quilt that’s still fairly warm and that dries quickly in the drier.

I quilted on either side of all the horizontal and vertical lines, and then machine-bound the front and hand-bound the back. Here’s the front:

Quilt front

And with, of course, a helpful cat — Carson — for scale (this is not a huge quilt, it’s lap-size):

Quilt front, with Carson modelling its use

And the back:

Quilt back

A close-up of the binding:

Machine-bound front, hand-bound back

I did make the spare squares into a cat mat and did some very experimental and inept free-motion quilting on it. I drew a big spiral on it and attempted to sew it. Kinda worked? But it isn’t pretty, close up.

Happily, there was enough binding left over from the quilt to bind the cat mat too. This is machine-bound both back and front, though; I’m not spending an hour hand-binding a wonky cat mat when I can do it on the machine in five minutes.

Cat mat, quilted and bound

The cats don’t seem to mind that the stitches vary widely in length and the lines are rather wobbly.

Some of my stitches are 3 or 4x as long as other stitches. Oh well.
Lola approves of the cat mat