The Bonkers Quilt is Finished!!
1st July 2026
It’s almost exactly a year since I stitched the very first piece onto our amazing technicolour dream quilt, and now at last it is DONE!! Well, I still have to add the hanging loops, but the quilt itself is complete, and I’m so proud of it - what a wonderful reflection of our creative, talented and caring community it is!
I brought it home from the session at the park, with the backing pinned in place ready to be tied. First, I had to add a few more patches in to fill the gaps around the edge where I’d squared it up.
The ties needed to go all over the quilt at 10cm intervals, and I tried to match the thread colours to the pieces on the top.
At each point I made a double stitch then tied with a surgeon’s knot on the back of the quilt.
I also needed to add a triangle at each corner to aid in the hanging of the quilt. It has no “right way up”, so I have to allow for it going whichever way its new owner wants it to!
I bought four different half metres of fabric for the binding as I couldn’t decide without seeing them, but only ended up using the pink and the blue.
I cut and pressed all the strips, then joined the pieces at 45° angles before attaching them to the quilt top on my machine, to avoid a bulky binding.
John helped me to manoeuvre the quilt through my machine to get the binding on, which was a huge help. I learned how to mitre the corners for a neat finish.
And finally, I turned the binding to back and hand-stitched it to the backing. I was very happy with how it turned out, especially as I’d never tackled backing and binding such a huge and heavy quilt before :)
I shared some of this process in this video if you’d like to see -