FINALLY! Some Progress...

These school holidays have really knocked my routine for getting sewing done regularly.  But, today was the day, and I finally got something done.  Two things actually :o)

But first up, I did kinda promise a photo of the pinafore dress I made - with me inside it.  So here goes...

With it turning a bit more spring like weatherwise (finally) - I ended up styling it a bit more casually, still with a long sleeved merino knit underneath, but with three quarter leggings and some casual flats.  Very comfortable.

OK, on to the sewing.  When I was quilting the cot quilt, I spent a *very small* amount of time sewing down the edges of the quilt top.  I don't usually to this, and it is not normally a problem, but because I was anticipating sewing the binding on by machine - onto the back - I figured that knowing that the quilt top was fixed was a good move.  This free motion wriggle did the trick and was nice and quick.

Then I did a bit of auditioning... my original idea was a black and white binding, with scrappy peeper border.

But after buying this black and white stripe I decided to switch positions and have this as the peeper, and the scrappy be the binding.

Following the cutting instructions on the Missouri Quilt Company's you-tube tutorial for magic binding... I cut my piles of fabric...

 And sewed the two bundles together... to create my 2.5" binding strip.

Then folded the binding strip in half and pressed... just like regular binding.  But you can already see the magic starting to happen can't you?

This is the back of the binding strip and it just looks like a regular binding.

Just another picture so you can start to see how the scrappy side of things is working.

And it's all done! The binding is sewn on to the back of the quilt, and then folded to the front, and topstitched in place along the peeper/flange seamline.

 I added in some of the leftover grey squares in places where I didn't want to join two colours together.  They are also really randomly placed.

And a close up of the topstitching.  I used a 3 stitch length - thinking that there was a lot of layers to get through.  It worked out OK, and I could have probably dropped back to a 2.5.

And the stitching on the back.

You can see here that the stitching on the back is not 100% straight or even, but it did stay on the blue backing fabric.  I have high hopes that this will improve with practice.

And I used a foot I've never used before - the Blind Hem foot.  Running the blade along the join in the binding, meant that it stayed pretty accurate.

I have decided to also bind the Stack, Shuffle Slide quilt using this machine applied "magic binding" method.  So looks like I will be getting some more practice soon.

Right, the second thing I got sewn today, was my Bernina Triangle Quilt-along blocks for Month Three.

I'm pretty sure it's time for Month 4 already.