Georgia On My Mind

In March 2009, during a quilt and waterfall trekking vacation through four southeastern states, we stopped at an adorable little quilt shop just over the border in Georgia. There I found some fabric charm packs and a lot of wonderful patterns to make use of them. I bought several, including this pattern which was intended as a birthday gift for a friend back home who was born and raised in Georgia as a child.

I borrowed the pattern from her and made up the table runner sometime in 2009. I finally got around to quilting it in July 2010 at a Saturday sewing session at the same friend's house. And just this weekend pulled it out of my sewing tote to finish the binding.

Fabrics are 100% cotton. All came from a charm pack except the sage green print that forms the stems, backing and binding - which came from my stash. Batting was from JoAnn's on the bolt. (Thermolam - the stuff that is almost like felt that you find in the interfacing section. I like this for runners and placemats because it lies very flat!) It was machine pieced and hand appliqued. The finished top was machine quilted; the background in a grid pattern that lined up with the corner triangles; the stem and leaves in outline, and the flower centers in concentric circles. Binding was cut on the grain, sewn into one continuous piece and applied with folds at the corners, pressed to the back and hand stitched to the back.

The project was easy enough. I used my own method for applique (using thin interfacing to machine stitch around the edges, then turning inside out and pressed flat). The stem was cut on bias, machine stitched on one side, folded over the raw edges and hand stitched on the second side. I've only done one other piece with corners not at right angles and had a lot of trouble with that binding. This one, while far from perfect, did turn out much better using a continuous strip, and the standard methodolgy of stitching almost to the corner, lifting the needle, folding the binding back, and begin stitching again. Hard to tell from this picture - some corners were much better than others. Just wasn't sure how much to fold back and at what angle. None of the other quilters at the sewing session that day had any idea either. There must be directions out there somewhere on the web and I'll just have to seek them out for future projects. This is not a project that I'm likely to repeat, however.