On progress and on lack of progress

Three quarters finished on the binding... and then it will be all over.  Hand sewing binding always puts a blister right on the end of my forefinger that holds the needle and a sore patch on my middle finger that assists with pushing it through (tried a thimble and it was just a hot sticky mess).  Hence short and irregular bursts of sewing.  I am such a wuss.

I am a firm believer in the saying "it's not over until the fat lady sings"... although in quilting terms, it relates to not making judgement until the quilting and binding are complete.  Even hubby has changed his opinion and quite likes it - with all it's restrained design aesthetic.

With spirals on the green, interlocking boxes on the blue, and an echo around the zigzag, the quilting helped to pull it all together.

Shows up nicely on the back.

This design has come about in such a round about sort of way - logic and necessity more than anything. You'll remember the initial drawing, which meant poor utilization of fabric, so I changed the zigzag to run horizontally as opposed to vertically, meaning that the other sections could be cut in one piece... across width of fabric since the quilt is 40" wide.  That design had the zigzag towards the bottom, with the large plain section at the top.  But as the only fabrics I could buy to match the charm square prints weren't the best matches... and I didn't want that much of the green, I switched the design to the zigzag at the top and a small section of green, with the heavier and bigger blue section at the bottom.  I had also intended to use the green as the binding... which would have looked amazing around the dark blue section.  But I didn't like it so much with the backing fabric I had bought, so stuck with the dark blue for the binding.  So all up... I'm happy with how it has turned out, regardless of how or why it all came about.  And I think it's a perfect design for someone who couldn't give a rats arse about quilting.

In other quilting news, once this baby quilt is finished up, I can return to the girl quilt under construction... now that I have another pack of charm squares to continue.  Quilting on Imogen's quilt has stalled as I consider what quilting designs to use to fill the balance of the space.  As often happens, indecision leads to no progress... but it's hard to do something when you don't know what to do.  I have one more week before heading back to work - so should really pull finger.

In other non-quilting news, uniform has been bought for Dylan's new school this year, and we had a dress rehearsal to check out how flash he looked - complete with new hair do.  Not that he was overly impressed - with either the uniform, hairdo or dress rehearsal.  They have a bottle green jumper/sweatshirt as well, but it was just too hot to force that on him too.

And a bit of holiday fun... a ginormous water slide set up at the town basin in Whangarei.  They had heaps of fun on this one!