Today I finished the scrap quilt. This morning I did the final stitching of the binding by hand. And then I decided that since I had done the hard part of lining up the edges front and back in the process I might as well do the feather stitching anyway. So I did that too. And here are the final pictures of the front and the back.

Not all of the cross sashings are lined up perfectly. If this were to be a finer quilt I would probably have redone at least some sections of some seams. But the objective was to get it done, and done it is.

The part I really liked was sewing the label into the binding. With the help of the manual, I was able to remember how to do this with my machine; when I got the memory open, I found that I had done this before, about 10 years ago. All I had to do was change the date and location and I was good to go. This one is stitched in pink thread on the blue background so it's more obvious. Later in the day I did one in dark blue thread on medium blue fabric; that one is definitely more subtle. The best part was that once the binding was sewn down the quilt was done - completely done.

Since this quilt was finished well before lunch I decided that I wasn't done for the day. I swept the floor and tidied up a little, cleared the sewing table off completely and got out the Yellow Brick Road that I had started free-motion quilting a few years ago. I was not at all happy with the quality of my quilting, so I put it aside and went on to other things. I decided that if today was the day for finishing imperfect quilts, then today was its day. Except for one final row of decorative stitching it is completely finished. I won't take the pictures until that stitching is done, but it is also bound and labeled. When I pulled it out I realized it didn't have nearly as much quilting left to do as I had remembered; evidently I had decided at some point to only to the center in a free-motion squiggle. That gave me a chance to put the walking foot on and do some wavy lines in the borders; since that stitching shows more, I wanted something that I was more willing to have seen.

I decided to just put a solid binding on it, since every other part of it is pretty busy. I pulled out a blue piece from the bottom of the solids pile and discovered it had a Piece Goods Shop remnant tag on it dated 2-90. I suspect it of being a polyester blend, but I went ahead and used it anyway. I did the label the same way I did on the scrap quilt, so now that the binding is sewn down, it's labeled as well. I was tempted to plow on and do the last bit of decorative stitching, but decided it was late enough that I could royally mess something up, and I'd hate to do that at this point in the day. So I'll work on that tomorrow, then post some pictures.

At some point in the day Diane came to visit and I took her into the studio to show her what I have been working on. That's when I discovered that I've misplaced the Disappearing Four-Patch; I've looked through every pile on every table, and it's not there. So I'll have to hunt for that some more tomorrow as well. I may have a chance this week to go to Monroe and shop for backing for it, so it would be really nice to have it measured before then.

Anyway, it was a good day in the studio. I may not have gotten much churchy stuff done, but there's always tomorrow morning. And if there isn't tomorrow morning, it won't matter that I don't have it done anyway.