Keep Awake and Bind On

It was a slow morning here. Mike and I went to bed fairly early last night. He sat up reading for a while, but I turned out my own light pretty early on. That meant I slept until 2:30 and then woke up. After two hours lying awake, I decided I might as well get up. That meant that around 8:30 this morning, I laid down for a morning nap and caught up on the sleep I still needed. It sure throws a monkey wrench into my morning routine when that happens. Fortunately it doesn't happen often.

So aside from my usual catching up on all things online, I did some embroidery, and then planned a trip to the grocery store. When I got home, I was finally able to get in some sewing.

Yesterday I did the quilting for the Fractured Flower Garden quilt. As I said yesterday, I kept the design simple. With all those vertical and horizontal lines, I decided it needed some soft curves, loops, and circles. It's a little hard to see the black thread on black fabric, and so I've messed with the contrast and brightness to make the stitching show up a little better in these images.

When it was all finished, it looked like this...not so different from how it looked before it was quilted, but there you go.

Here's how it looks on the back. I needed a little more length to that piece, and so I added those black panels. 

The black fabric I'm using is a special purchase I made for the Plain and Simple quilt, way back when. And that gives me an excuse to post a picture of Plain and Simple, one of my favorite quilts ever.

My long arm quilter, Erin Davis, did the beautiful quilting on this quilt. Erin is especially good with traditional designs, and she really did a great job for me. There are some nine-patch blocks in that quilt, and so I'll use this as my link-up for the 9-Patch theme today at:

You can see the post I wrote when this quilt was finished right here.

Anyway...that black fabric is a very tight weave, like a batik, and so black it's almost blue. It was perfect for my Amish sampler, and I used up the last of it in this Fractured Flower Garden. I bring that up because I noticed a little bearding on the black panels on the back, possibly because of the tight weave of the fabric? Only guessing, but maybe the needle had to work a little harder to punch through.

So I took the advice of my good blogging friend Sue who told me that if one sprays water on bearding, it will suck back into the fabric when it dries. And it worked! Such a simple solution to a vexing problem.

After I got home from the grocery store today, I had some time to machine sew the binding onto my quilt. Thanks to all who offered up your opinons and suggestions for the binding. I decided to go with the black binding, but I included a very narrow little flange of the pinky red stuff. Here's how it looks:

There's about four inches left of that original five-yard piece of black now. I suppose it'll get used sometime. All that's left to do now is to hand sew the binding, and this third challenge for Project Quilting 6 will be finished. Cutting those blocks into little pieces was gratifying on so many levels, and I ended up with a pretty quilt in the deal. You can't beat that.