Finish Report! ~ "It's a Silky Wool Flannel Kind of Day" ~ Aug OMG

  I've had my August OMG finished for a week now, but have had a lot of trouble getting true-to-life photographs. I'm giving up and posting anyway.  :) 

At 48 x 62 inches, "It's a Silky Wool Flannel Kind of Day" is perfect for a September sofa cuddler. Our evenings get nippy here starting - well, now - and I'm loving the feel of this so much. 

Plus, this has a very unique binding that I absolutely adore.

I call it, "Puffed Silk Binding," and that will link you to the page describing how it was done.

In August 2017, my daughter gave me a wonderful jelly roll from the Maywood "Woollies Flannel" collection, and that November I sewed it up jelly race style, randomly inserting parallelograms of the gold Silk Radience I'd bought for its backing.

This April, I quilted it up using the pantograph, "Autumn Oaks" from Willow Leaf Studio. I usually do custom quilting on my own quilts, but once in a while they are better suited for all-over designs. This fall theme gave the quilt a gorgeous organic feeling that really elevated the jelly race "blah" feeling to a scrumptious quilt finish.

I used washable silk batting! I wondered if the thickness of the wool flannel would take away the charm of the silk batting's hand, but it's a very nice combination, particularly with the silk backing. (Although, the silk on silk *did* want to slip around during the quilting, so you have to be aware of that tendency while working.)

This is how shiny the silk actually looks.  :)

All this quilt's lusciousness (and the fact that it's mine and will get only gentle laundering on occasion) just begged for an unusual binding treatment - something softer than traditional binding or knife-edge, but not as substantial as a beaded-flanged binding. Something soft right on the edge itself.

So I wondered about doing a puffed binding. I couldn't find anything online like what I saw in my mind's eye, so I experimented on a mug rug.

Still need to finish this up. . . 

I'm putting together a tutorial, but all I did, really, was cut the silk radiance binding strips slightly larger than normal, so that I had an extra 1/4 inch of slack in the applied binding once it was stitched down on the back. After that, I spent TV time cinching the poofs down one by one all the way around. I found that 7/8  inch was a great spacing for this, and used 50wt Aurifil thread (single strand, double stitched and knotted on the back before and after each puff's cinch). 

The result is exactly what I'd pictured, and so very perfect on this quilt.  Next is to see how well it holds up over the years, but it feels very stable. Silk Radiance has a slightly stiff, but very flowy, hand when you're working with it this way, so it stands up nicely in the puffs. Regular quilting cottons (or, say, dupioni silk) would just fold in on themselves without puffing much - you would need something inside, like tulle, to give the puffs body.

So, yes, I would do a puffed binding again on the right quilt.  :)

Note to self: Embroidery with a single strand of 100wt silk was not the easiest!

This was the perfect quilt to develop the binding technique on - all the individual components came together in a way to make the whole so much more than the sum of the parts! Who thought a jelly-roll race would make such a remarkable finish?

LINKING UP at

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TGIFF

 Elm Street Quilts for the August Finish Report