Biscotti Pips

Hello, everyone in blog-land, it sure has been awhile! Hopefully everyone has had a great Thanksgiving weekend, for those of you that celebrated. We had two dinners this year, one Thursday with my husband's family, then dinner at our house yesterday with my family (sans a sick brother and plus another brother's new girlfriend, who I love!) and with Lee's parents. I ate a bit too much pie, the gym was not fun this morning! I sure am thankful for my good health which allows me to go the gym and work off some of the added calories I ate.

As you can probably guess, I have been busy with schoolwork lately, so not much quilting has gotten done, until last week. I whipped out two baby quilts in one week, I sure did miss it! One quilt was another Husker Play Square that one of my boss's paid me (yay) to make for a friend's new baby girl. The other was for my own friends' 2nd baby, whom will be hear sometime next month. They were in Nebraska from Colorado yesterday to visit family and stopped by for a visit and to receive their baby quilt.

They don't know the sex of their baby (which they call Biscotti), so I wanted to do something gender neutral, but I also really wanted to use my charm pack of Sherbet Pips, so if Biscotti is a boy, he will have some pink in his quilt. :) I am not one to stick to gender color rules though, and neither are these friends, so they didn't mind. I call this quilt "Biscotti Pips."

I used a dark grey Kona solid to alternate between the charm squares, then I found a blue solid that closely matched the blue in the Sherbet Pips line for the backing, and a red dot fabric for the binding. I did straight line quilting a 1/4 inch on each side of the seams with blue thread that matched the back. I love the way the back of the quilt looks, unfortunately I didn't get a picture of it in time.

Once again I attached the binding completely with my sewing machine. I love the time I save by doing it this way! I referred back to this tutorial and also discovered how to get great corners by attaching binding by machine. After attaching the binding to the back of the quilt, press the binding down with your iron at the corners on the back of the quilt.

Then flip the quilt over, fold the binding over the corners on the front of the quilt:

 

and press with your iron once more. This helps to hold the binding in place when attaching the binding to the front of the quilt.

Here is how the binding turned out on the front:

and the back:

When pressing the binding in the corners, it also helps to press it all around the quilt to make sure you are folding it over in equal amounts. Hopefully these tips are helpful for someone, I wish I had learned this a few quilts back, my corners of the binding never turn out perfect, until I tried this.
Next on my to-do list are two Christmas lap quilts for our living room, and a quilt my friend Mandy has asked me to make her nephew as a Christmas/1st Birthday quilt, her request: Eric Carle or Dr. Seuss. I am very excited! Hopefully I will be back to blogging in a few weeks, the fall semester is almost over!