After Sunday's slight disaster with the quilting, I started again yesterday, and this time things went to plan - as you can see from this view of the back, I have stitched round the bird and added some detail to her tail feathers and the stones she is standing on (I think a pink and silver bird has to be a female!)
I added some grasses in the corner, and started to stitch squished spirals - this is as far as I got yesterday
This morning I finished the spirals - which had a tendency to go round, instead of squished!
then I used a decorative stitch on the border
this is how the back now looks
Recently Alison (no blog) asked if I could do a tutorial on how to bind a quilt, so I thought I would show you the simple way I bind wallhangings. First, I trimmed the excess wadding and backing fabric away, making sure the corners were square
I cut four two and a half inch strips, folded them in half longways and ironed them, and also cut a piece of calico to make a hanging sleeve, pressing under a quarter inch on the long bottom edge, and folding a quarter inch hem over twice on the sides
I stitched the binding on the sides, matching up the raw edges of the binding to the edge of the right side of the wallhanging. Then I folded the binding over to the wrong side, so that it just covered the stitching ....
.... and pinned it at the ends
the next stage was to pin the sleeve in place on the wrong side, matching the raw edges
then I stitched the binding on the top and bottom, with a half inch of binding extending beyond the edge at either side. I turned this in
then folded the binding over, just covering the stitches as before
this is how the corner looks on the right side
The final stage will be to hand stitch the binding on the back, but for the moment I have just pinned it in place (and I will also stitch the bottom of the sleeve, making sure the stitches don't come through to the right side)
But wait ........ there is something missing! Ah, that's better
..... a suitably girly eye, using pretty buttons!
I should have been showing you the next two Farmer's Wife blocks - but when I got the book out and looked at the next two, I didn't have the templates I needed ...... so I spent the rest of the afternoon cutting out the templates instead of sewing!