Charlie Brown Quiltalong Part 6: Marking and Quilting

I am a huge fan of free motion quilting which means I usually do not mark my quilts.  This quilt is an exception.  I've noticed my 3 boys fight over my 1 lightly quilted quilt and when I layered our bed with a FMQ quilt my husband complained that it was "too rumply."  I'm free motion quilted a quilt with a sheet backing before and it was not that pleasant (very slick, hard to manouever) so I decided to straight line quilt this.  FIrst echoed the top and bottom of the zigzag inside the zigzag with black thread.  I had no idea how to mark the black without a chalk pencil on hand, then I just flipped over to the back and marked between the 2 black zigzags with my disappearing ink pen.

For the yellow areas, I changed my thread (top and bottom) to a yellow poly cotton thread.  I always use 100 percent cotton quilting thread but this sheet is poly cotton so I think this option is fine for this quilt.  I had the yellow thread on hand.  When you straight line quilt, you want to start with a fresh needle.  Old needles cause skipped stitches.  I also like a slightly longer stitch (2.5-3).  You don't want a tiny stitch because it will cause puckering and it won't look as nice.  If you have a walking foot, use it.  It is a such a pain to get my walking foot on, but it is SO worth it. 

This is my walking foot.  It has a huge white contraption on the back of it and underneath the foot there are "teeth" that help guide your top fabric at the same rate your feed dogs are guiding your bottom fabric.

I used my large ruler and a disappearing ink marker to echo the quilting lines I made in my black zigzag.  Only mark your quilt right before you want to quilt it so you can quickly remove the ink.  If you leave your quilt with those disappearing ink marks in a humid environment, your marks could disappear before you get back to them- what a waste.  Living in Houston (land of humidity), I only drew the lines I knew I could get to immediately.  We found that using a paintbrush to paint water onto your disappearing ink was a good method that was less messy.  A spray bottle would work ,too.

After quilting, you will need to trim up your quilt and bind it.  Here are a list of different binding tutorials you can use to finish off your quilt.  I highly recommend hand binding- just nothing like it!

Binding Flange Tutorial, Mitered binding tutorial, Making Bias binding: Jaybird Quilts
Rounded Quilt Corners: That Girl That Quilt
Tying a Quilter's Knot: Turning Turning
My favorite hand binding stitch: Ladder Stitch Tutorial
The binding tutorial that got me started: Crazy Mom Quilts
Pocket bindings (Amie converted me to this...begin at 3:36 mark for pocket binding info):



I use Coats and Clark hand quilting thread to hand sew my bindings to the back side.  I never have issues with tangling thread.  I've had issues with the hand quilting thread they have at Hobby Lobby, so I don't use that stuff.

Any questions?  Links to other tutorials? Let us know in the comments!