Trying to Stretch some skills!

Maybe it's the retired educator in me, but I'm a big proponent of "lifetime learning" and translating that into quilting means always trying something new. So this latest quilt was my first scalloped edge quilt. Now let me back up--I have made a couple of table toppers that were not square or rectangle, but never a full bed quilt with actual scallops. So having volunteered to make a silent auction quilt for a friend's benefit dinner, I thought this would be perfect! And this beautiful black and coral paisley begged to be a nice, wide scalloped edged border.

So I plunged in--I marked the scalloped edges just as I was told my a quilt buddy with a 9" paper plate and mostly got the consistency I was wanting. I then spent about 19hrs of doing ruler work on the long arm. Once finished, I removed the quilt and then had to figure out how to bind! Yikes! this part was HARD! Two different YouTube tutorials had two different ideas--the first suggested sewing the binding on to the front and THEN trimming the scallops. Well, I started that but just was too bothered by the extra fabric and didn't feel like I was getting it lined up right (also, since this lovely paisley was a black background it was hard to see the black quilting lines). So I opted to use the 2nd tutorial and trimmed first and then watched the rest of the tutorial where it suggested that you NOT piece the bias strips together until you are certain that the join seams won't fall into the inside turns of the scallops. Yikes again--I'd already joined all of them! So then I started attaching the binding, knowing that I might have to unsew a seam and adjust were the join seam would fall so to avoid the inside turns.

This truly was a learning experience. Not only have I learned how to make scalloped borders (and the true test of binding them!) but it's also taught me I won't be using scalloped borders very often!

So what new technique have you been learning? Happy Quilting!