How to Make a Kitty Quilt - Step 10

Mom machine quilts the kitty quilts by sewing a line of stitches between each of the four rows of blocks. She sews very close the the edge of one row. It is called "stitching in the ditch." It's tricky, and sometimes the rows of stitches wobble a bit, but most of the time it is almost invisible.
Mom uses grey thread for sewing the blocks together, and even the quilting. She says it's such a neutral, it fades into the background of any color.


It took Mom many quilts to figure out how to do the quilting without the quilt backing fabric rippling. Originally she tried to sew all three rows one after the other. But finally she figured out doing the middle row first, then smoothing out the top and backing, pinning in place, and then sewing the next quilting row eliminated the rippling. Notice in the picture there are lots of pins on each side of the row of quilting.

Ok, the really observant cat will notice that on this pink quilt above, Mom is using pink thread. I don't know what got into her, except that it's my quilt (finally)

After the quilting is complete, you get to smooth it all out (again), take out the pins and trim the backing and any fleece sticking out beyond the top of the quilt.

The last step, adding the binding, will come real soon!

(you can click the pictures to biggify)