On this Neapolitan quilt I wanted to test a method of quilting with my longarm. My machine is one of the least expensive 18" models, not equipped like the fancy high priced ones. I have a little gadget called a channel lock which I place over a wheel so the machine can only move sideways. A friend who has the same machine told me it doesn't work very well and I found out that is true when quilting this quilt.
I wanted parallel lines with random width spacing between them.
The back is made from two of the fabrics that are in the blocks. The 5" strip that is pieced in hardly shows in this photo.
I couldn't find a large enough piece of any of the fabrics in the quilt for binding so the search was on. The pinks in the quilt have a slight peachy tone so most other pink fabrics just didn't go with it. I couldn't find any browns that looked good either.
Then I found this piece that had the right kind of both the pink and the brown in it. It took a half hour to load the quilt, a little over an hour to quilt it and 4+ hours to do the binding. This was a tough batik that was hard to hand stitch through. It is 43.5" x 52.25" before washing. I imagine it will shrink in quite a bit more in width when washed because of the style of quilting.
