It Was Supposed To Be a Rug

After I bought a new ottoman to sit on when sewing, I decided to make a rug to go with it.  Now I decided that it's going to be a wall hanging instead, and I have two good reasons for my decision. 

First, it looked kind of puny on the floor (even though it's roughly 2 feet by 4 feet), but made a huge impact when I held it up against my sewing room wall.

And second - look at how wavy it was when I thought I was done quilting.  Wowza.

I quilted the borders first.  Believe me, they used to be nice and flat...

... until I free motioned this center block.  You can't see the stitching, but 99% of all these lines and curves are quilted.  It's not that I like free motion quilting - I dislike it very much.  But I didn't want to do straight line quilting all over this boisterous pattern.

So I went back to the borders and added lines and lines and lines of stitching until I was so bored that I decided it was enough.

Incidentally, this is a good shot of the edge that shows what a pillowcase binding looks like.  No skinny little binding, just a continuous flow of the top right out to the edge, like one of those infinity pools.

Here's the front now that I'm finished.  You can see it still has a little wiggle going on.  Put that on the floor and it's a candidate for tripping.

When I was auditioning borders for this project, I thought I was going to use the same fabrics on the top and bottom borders.  The fabrics in the top horizontal borders are what I chose.  But then I thought it would be more interesting to have different ones on the other end, because sometimes you just can't have enough busyness going on.

Now that it's a wall hanging, I can either hang it this way, with the orange on the top...

... or this way with the orange on the bottom.  I like it this way better.  I think.

Here's the back.  I chose these fabrics back when I thought this would be a reversible rug.  I could use it as a reversible wall hanging, but the bobbin work of my free motion stitching leaves a little something to be desired.  

I still need to add a sleeve and a label, but I wanted to show this to you today.  I think I'll put a sleeve on each end, in case I change my mind on which direction is up.  I seem to do that a lot.