Sci­ence fact: all of the best interi­ors pho­tos have indis­tinct piles of stuff in them in the background.

After what feels like a mil­lion years of hav­ing the many stages of quilt evol­u­tion lying around my liv­ing room, the quilt is finally done! As of this morn­ing it is bound, washed, and wait­ing to be used. It is wonky, it is ran­dom, and — if I may say so myself — it’s wonderful.

Dis­turb­ingly, given how much I was dread­ing it, I think my favour­ite part of the whole thing was hand­sew­ing the bind­ing. I star­ted last night, and fin­ished this morn­ing — a good few hours of work, but slightly addict­ive as you watch the quilt really form in front of you. Because we go away later today, my obsess­ive part kicked in once I’d star­ted and wanted it all fin­ished before I left and, cour­tesy of a lousy night’s sleep, it was.

What’s that? You want a wonky, badly framed bird’s eye view of the whole quilt top? Well, that’s lucky…

You can see in this photo the corner of the quilt not bound in yel­low, but by scraps of the top — there wasn’t quite enough yel­low to go round, and I was loathe to go out and buy more fab­ric, so impro­vised with what I had left. I actu­ally quite like it; it’s make­shift and unplanned, much like the rest of the quilt.

The toughest part for me was man­hand­ling the whole thing through the sew­ing machine dur­ing the quilt­ing pro­cess — it was sur­pris­ingly phys­ical work for me, though I’m a feeble weak­ling at the best of times. I was pretty anxious about mak­ing the bind­ing — after a failed attempt, I finally sat on Tues­day night and meas­ured out. Just hav­ing Al in the room while I did so helped me to keep it all in per­spect­ive -  I really hope all nervous quilters have help­ful live-in engin­eers to calm them down and show them how best to use a ruler.

For now though, I’m just excited with the fin­ished product and immod­estly impressed with myself for actu­ally fin­ish­ing a pro­ject! I have very much been taken with the quilt­ing bug, and want to get star­ted on my next pro­ject as soon as we’re home. Luck­ily, someone has been spend­ing all of her money on quilt­ing fab­rics for the last while, so there’s no end of options for Quilt II!