Almost There

Here is the almost completed quilt top.

After completing 5 rows, I was not feeling happy with the results - too much patchwork, to0 much bright colours, too quilty ......

Don't get me wrong, I love quilts and appreciate the amount of love & labour that goes into each and every one, I'm just very particular about the style. I usually find quilts fit more into a Country, Americana or Shabby Chic style of decorating. So in my home, my quilting really needs to be a little more restrained, definately not the old fashioned style of crazy quilting for this girl.

So what I ended up doing to calm down how busy the quilt looked is this. I followed the example of my daughter Sebrina's quilt (see at left), where she used the blocks to border a feature fabric.

I didn't have enough of the feature fabric to do a large centre square with a single border, so I came up with this idea of two rows on either end with a centre strip equal to two rows plus two white edges. Then I put a 5" border around the whole thing. You can see from the top picture that I draped it across a double bed and it is still not quite as large as I want it, so may do a little more piecework around the edge, or I may put another border with one of my other printed fabrics before the final assembly.

The only problem I have right now is ...

1. I've run out of white quilting thread &
2. I've run out of white fabric for the border.

So far, I am much more content with the look of this quilt top which will definately not end up in the rag bag, which incidently is where the first one was headed for.

I have decided to mitre my corners for a cleaner finish. Here is a closeup of the first mitre. This picture is taken on our hardwood floors, so the seams are quite obvious, they won't be so obvious when the white quilting batt and the backing is on.

Time for a breather, I'll pick up my missing bits tomorrow and get back to quilting on Tuesday.

T.T.F.N.