Rag Quilt is almost done!!!

Yea! My rag quilt is nearly finished! Here's the breakdown on the final (although tedious) steps for completing a rag quilt.

After sewing the squares together to make your square of three rows, you lay out all the blocks to make sure you like the arrangement and that you have enough blocks (which despite my best planning, I was still short one blue floral block (back to Creative Sewing to purchase $2.49 of fabric for said square ;-)

This is what my squares looked like laid out:



Squares are all sewn together, border added, and voila!:


Now, in the above picture, I'm showing the "clean" side of the quilt, the non-textured side.

Below, you can see the other side with the exposed seams. The final step is to snip about every one-half inch (making sure not to cut too far through the sewing) on all your blocks. This takes FOREVER, but this is the step that creates the frayed texture on your quilt.

Here are the exposed seams before I cut them:


and here they are after snipping:

If you're curious about the time it takes to do the "snipping," I worked on this on the car ride down to Oxford this weekend, and in two hours, I finished about two rows. There are 13 rows in the quilt...

If hands could be exercised, I'd have the best lookin' hands in the world! Actually, there are special scissors made just for completing this part of a rag quilt.

This will get washed and dried two complete cycles to achieve the amount of fraying I like, and then - FINALLY - the quilt will be complete and ready for some cozy movie watching!