Almost Finished - Need Some Input, Please
I am in the process of finishing my quilt top, I just busted my stash and did a ton of 9-patches (5.5in x 5.5in), I don't have a lot of room for fabric and I'm hoping to start in on my sister's DWR the beginning of next year and I need some input from you awesome ladies!
The picture below only shows a small portion of the quilt, the finished size is going to be around 93 x 104 (roughly, I don't have my notes near me) and my fiance and I have been going back and forth on how it should be quilted and finished. I'm going to be using a low-loft batting, I want it to be warm but without a bunch of bulk because we have two medium-sized dogs (really, they're big babies) that sleep with us on a queen sized bed and their heat output is horrendous sometimes.
My original intention was to stitch in the ditch using a white thread, there's not a whole lot of white in the quilt, I thought it would be kind of a nice way to introduce some contrast. However, that has been knocked down because my original sewing machine is in the shop waiting on a part, so I am sewing this on a mini-machine and the space under the arm is entirely too small to send a quilt through. This will be done before I'm able to get my machine out of the shop and this quilt was born out of severe necessity, my last comforter blew up in the washing machine in spectacular fashion.
I remember my grandmother's quilts and one of her 9-patch quilts was tied off at the intersections and that's what I've decided to do, but, it raised a couple of questions, so I thought I would post them here and see what everyone thought. I tried asking my older sister if she remembered grandma's quilt, she said she did but couldn't remember all the details, so here it goes....
Should I use embroidery thread (white), or would yarn (white) do the trick better?
I ask this because I am slightly worried about bearding from the batting once this quilt begins to get used and laundered. The needles I would need to use to tie the intersections off would leave bigger holes in it, so I'm trying to alleviate that problem the best that I can. I know that batting technology has improved over the years to stop this issue, but I still have that thought in the back of my head.
Last set of questions (I think), should each intersection be tied off, or should I alternate intersections, both by columns and by rows - I hope that makes sense?
Grandma used both the embroidery thread and yarn and she tied off all the intersections on one quilt, then alternated on another, so I know it's more or less a personal preference more than anything, but I'm kind of in the middle of both.
Any thoughts??
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