It's not done yet, but it's far enough along that I now feel like I can actually post a photo of it. This is the WIP that I've been referencing lately: my niece's wallhanging, a paper-piecing project where I worked from scratch, one that could have gone horribly awry any step along the way.
I've now gotten past the big scary mean piece that could have ended up being terribly traumatic--piecing that outer ring. B-T-Dubs, it's looking a lot more wonky in this picture than I think it is in real life, but who knows. Maybe it is that wonky. That just makes it more charming. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
The colors also didn't come out true-to-life in the pic--the really, really dark strips are violet and dark blue, not black like they look here. It's a pretty happy quilt--lots of jewel tones. The background is two white tone-on-tone fabrics alternating--you can't really see it here but it provides a little bit of textural interest to the back without it being obtrusive. Once it's on white batting, I don't think the seams will show quite as much.
At the moment, it's just pinned up in rough approximation of its eventual shape; I didn't worry about aligning anything yet. I just wanted to see how it was turning out. I'll center it and make sure it's all even when I baste it. I'm going to do raw-edge applique with a blanket stitch in some fun color; I figured that would fit its sort of 70s-folksy/hippie vibe. And it's easier to boot. Win all around.
I'm debating what I'm going to do for an inner border still--I may do something with the leftover fabric from the peace sign (used a bunch of fat quarters and only needed a strip or two out of each). I have a cute peace sign print fabric for the border, so the inner border needs to be mostly fairly solid and plain. I've got a coordinating fabric to the outer border that I'll probably use for backing and binding, although I'm waiting until everything else is done to decide what kind of binding needs to frame it.
As for quilting, I'm debating between a simple grid on the background, or echo quilting. Leaning towards a grid, mostly because that will get this thing out of my house and on its way to my niece a lot faster!
That's all I'm going to do for today. I have a meeting in about an hour and a half and my son left me his cold when he moved back to college (and a messy room, but that doesn't affect me as much on a daily basis), so I think I'm going to crash with some hot tea for a bit and work my way up to meeting-mode.
Sandy's blog on quilting, life, and sundry.
