Dear Jane Questions

I have had a couple of questions about the machine quilting of Dear Jane so I thought I would answer them here.

1) What kind of thread did I use?  I used Aurafil 50 weight cotton for all of the cream color and some of the colored threads, and for the bobbin thread.  I used DMC 50 weight cotton thread for the rest of the colored thread that I needed.

2)  Batting - I used Quilter's Dream Request batting, which is the thinnest of their cotton battings.  I really like the drape with this batting.

I also wanted to talk about how I stabilized this quilt.  Several years ago when I quilted Sylvia's Bridal Sampler, I stitched in the ditch around all of the blocks before quilting anything in the blocks.  This made quilting the blocks so much harder for me.  There was a lot of excess fabric that wanted to pucker.

I was worried about stabilizing the Dear Jane for that reason!  I even debated about not stitching in the ditch at all, but in the end I felt like I needed to.

So, what I did was stabilize both sides of the middle block from the top of the quilt to the bottom and from side to side.  I then quilted inside the center block and the eight blocks surrounding it.  Next I ditch quilted the next two rows, on either side of the middle, in both directions, then quilted all of the blocks around those stabilized blocks.  I kept doing this and quilting my way out from the center. It worked out great!  For me, it worked much better than ditch quilting and stabilizing the whole quilt first.  Less puckers, less excess fabric and therefore less stress. It was tedious but still interesting because each block was different.

We hung it up!  It looks like this place in our home was made just for this quilt - it fits perfectly!