Charity Sewing for PMQG

Over the summer, the Philly Modern Quilt Guild kicked off the Jay McCarroll Habitat Challege with a block design contest. We each received fabric and got to design a block to be considered. This was the block I designed.

All of these blocks are going to be used for charity quilts to be sent to Japan for earthquake relief. PMQG held a sewing day to get all the quilt tops put together and members were asked to take them home for quilting. I took one and decided to try a few new things since the quilt is so small. This is the first quilt I've quilted with stippling!

The blocks are pretty awesome aren't they? That's a big part of why I did stippling. With all those different designs, I couldn't decide how to quilt this one. Here's a close up of my quilting. I chose a light gray thread that matched with the sashing.

I think the back of the quilt is just as cool...

And the other new technique I tried was machine binding the edges. I used a "fancy" stitch from my machine that kind of looks like "X's". I figure this will hold up better to lots of use (since we don't know where these will end up) than hand stitching would. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Now to get it washed up and returned to the Guild for donation!

I'm linking up to Try New Things Thursday. Have you tried something new lately?