Hello My Quilting Friends! Today I’m chatting with my awesome quilting friend Christa Watson about piecing and quilting with precut fabrics. This just happens to also be the topic of Christa’s new quilting book! Listen or download the episode here:
Or you can watch the episode and see me stitching away at this forever cross stitch project in my living room:
This is a terrific book for slicing into those precut packs you’ve stashed away so you can turn those nice fabrics into beautiful quilts. Best of all, piecing with precuts can be a lot faster and save you time in the cutting process.
The one downside is you can’t prewash precuts and Christa and I talk through how to manage that at the end of the project. Christa doesn’t like washing fabrics cut smaller than a fat quarter because they can distort and get weird on the edges. She does wash fat quarters in lingerie bags and that helps contain their tendency to fray on the edges.
Click Here to check out ChristaQuilts.com, her website where she shares lots of informative posts, plus has a terrific quilt shop where you can buy her books and fabrics.
Speaking of fabric, Christa recently designed a new fabric line called Modern Marks. She sent me a mini quilt and I got to quilt it!
Christa and I share a lot of quilting habits, but one place we differ is on quilt basting. She prefers to spray baste her quilts together and has shared an excellent tutorial on how she sprays the quilt top and backing fabric, then layers everything together on her design wall.
What I love the most about Christa is how energetic and enthusiastic she is about quilting, teaching, and running her business. She really fires me up and inspires me to keep trying new things. You never know if you’ll like something until you try it!
Podcast Sponsor
This week’s podcast is sponsored by our new Basting Basics Workshop.Come learn all the basics of basting a big quilt, plus lots of tips on picking the best quilt batting for your project in this online quilting class.
This workshop will come in very handy this week as we’ve pieced the Rainbow Log Cabin Quilt and now it’s time to baste and quilt it together.
This week I’ve been continuing my mission of finishing older projects. In the evening, I’ve been working on this little painted needlepoint gingerbread house and making very SLOW progress. Who would have thought cross stitch could take so long?
I’ve also pulled out the Winter Wonderland Quilt Pattern. This was a quilt pattern I created back in 2010 and really needed an update. James and I had a photo shoot together this weekend before it got really cold again. He mostly shot pictures of the chickens and cats, but shot a few of the quilt too.
Working on this has felt a bit like traveling back in time. It also reminded me how much I love this quilt and the unique technique Reverse Shadow Trapunto that’s used to create the beautiful blocks.
I’m going to double and triple check my math and hand this off to Josh for the editing and layout. Be looking forward to these snowflakes falling back on the quilt shop by the end of the month!
This week I also shared a video on how to piece your Rainbow Log Cabin Quilt together into one big quilt top. It’s so nice to go to the Facebook Group and see all the bright rainbow quilts filling up the feed!Click Here to find the latest tutorial.
As for walking foot designs, last week we learned how to quilt Crazy Lines. I love how easily everyone is jumping into walking foot quilting. I’ve been teaching free motion quilting for years and it’s always such a struggle for beginners to get started and overcome the starting ugly stitches.
Walking foot quilting doesn’t seem to have that barrier to entry and that is wonderful to see. Just in case you miss any videos or posts, remember you can always find them right here on our website.
Leah Day has been teaching online since 2009. She's the creator of the Free Motion Quilting Project, a blog filled with thousands of quilting tutorial videos. Leah has written several books including 365 Free Motion Quilting Designs, Explore Walking Foot Quilting with Leah Day, and Mally the Maker and the Queen in the Quilt.
Ad: Click Here to find Christa’s newest book Piece and Quilt with Precuts. 
