Quilt 30: Oh, Baby... DONE!

My friend Kay is about to become a grandmother for the first time. She's terribly excited (who wouldn't be?). I've had the fabric for this quilt for a couple of years - got it from a quilting magazine (a gift new new subscribers). The fabric was HORRIBLE to work with, but I finally finished it and got the quilting done on the longarm ... and here it is:

Now I'll tell you what I learned on this one (and about the mistake). Look closely at the photo above. The border at the bottom is blue, then a yellow one above it and... above that... do you see the line in the stitching? It looks a bit like a fold. What caused that? It's caused by having a space between two lines of "end-to-end" stippling quilting which is larger than the other spaces. Ugh.

I've not figured out how to advance the quilt (with groovy boards). The groovy board gives me 2 lines of end-to-end stippling. But then I have to advance the quilt and reposition to get the 3rd and 4th lines of stippling. And I haven't figured out how to get it positioned perfectly, so there's always a little more or a little less spacing between rows 2 and 3 than there is between 1 and 2.

So what I've learned on this quilt is that it's better to have a slightly smaller gap than a slightly larger one.  I found that if my spacing was smaller, that tell-tale fold line just didn't appear.

Here (above) is the backing - a pastel lime stripe. Very fresh and although it doesn't exactly match the greens on the top, it's not close to any of those greens, so it fools your eye. You THINK it matches.

And here (above) is a closeup of the binding, done with the same fabric as the backing. It works beautifully.

So this one is finished and I gave it to Kay when I saw her last Monday. She's delighted with it and I'm delighted that she likes it.