Plum Millie - the Finish

This morning I finished my latest quilt, based on the Modern Millie pattern.  I call my quilt Plum Millie, because of the plum-colored background fabric.

It was mostly done for a long time - I just couldn't decide which binding to use.  These were the contenders - the green at the top was a very late entrant.  

Here was my thought process:

• The plum binding on the right didn't give enough of a stopping point for my eye.  
• The peach at the bottom was a candidate because I used it on the back sashing.  It softened all the jewel tones of the quilt front, but it looked too puny.  
• The fabric on the left is what my strips are made of, and it felt too matchy-matchy to use that in the binding.  
• I went through my stash one more time, and this time unearthed the chartreuse batik at the top, which was the winner. 

This was the perfect choice - powerful enough to hold its own while introducing a nice contrast.

This photo also shows a good view of the quilting.  You might remember that I quilted each 12" block separately, made with a full sandwich.  

In an ideal world, it would have looked better if I had pieced the top, then made a normal sandwich with one large backing piece.  That way I could have carried those different colors of thread continuously from one block to the next.  But I do all my own quilting and only have one domestic machine, and I'm not a fan of heaving and pushing all that bulk around.  So lately I've been experimenting with various types of quilt-as-you-go.

From this far back, the quilting doesn't really seem to matter too much.  

I spent a lot of time arranging the blocks just so, and making sure I didn't mix them up when quilting.  Now I look at it and wonder what the big deal was.  Besides, I picked a spot where I need to hang it in a landscape, not portrait orientation, which completely wasted that time.

  

Since I quilted full sandwiches, I had to cover my seams with sashing.  This peach fabric worked well, and it was one of candidates for the binding.

There's no sleeve on here, because I wanted it to be a double-sided quilt.  I'm going to put those pinch-type curtain rings on it and slide it onto a curtain rod.

I'm not sure I'll do this type of quilt-as-you-go again.  Those back seams are bunchy and knobby, and the sashing isn't straight.  I didn't think I would care, but I do.  

I guess I found my limits in the number of shortcuts I'm willing to take when making a quilt.  I've never sent a quilt out for quilting, and never will, so I need to find a happy medium.

Tired of working on this quilt, I made the simplest quilt label ever.  Then I stitched it into the block that coordinated with it the best, so it would blend in.