Clam Shells and Binding

I like the look and feel of clam shell quilting and decided to give it a go. I wouldn't do a large area on a solid fabric until I was much better at it however I did squeeze some into my Mom's African banner quilt. It was surprisingly easy to do!

I started by drawing equidistant parallel lines on the area I wanted to fill with clam shells. I started at the dot on the lower left and made half circles that touch the line above. When I got to the far right I had to figure out how to get to the row above and I figured out two methods.

The first method is to backtrack on the last half circle until I got to the top where the dot is marked.

From there I made my half circles from the right to the left. The second method for preparing to stitch the row above is to stop at the mid-point of the half circle as indicated by the dot on the left.

From there I could just continue making the half circles.

Here are a couple of my practice sandwiches. Personally I found it easier to work with smaller clam shells rather than larger clam shells.

When I was making my Lazy Girl quilt I wrote about filling in the spaces with "doodling" and this would be a great bit of filler for that kind of quilting.

I'm stitching down the binding on Piccadilly to the Nines. I wrote a little tutorial about my easy method for joining the beginning and end of the binding. You will find it here. I like to cut my binding strips at 2 1/4" wide. I find that 2 1/2" is just a little too much whereas 2 1/4" is just perfect and the binding is nicely filled with the edge of the quilt.

I love a nice neat bound corner.  One down, three to go!

Until I post again, happy sewing!
Karen H