Quilt Top Finished

Well, my plan to finish the quilt by tonight was overambitious.  A few things went wrong, other things came up, and I barely managed to finish sewing the top.  But it looks good :)

Borders

I only figured out how to reliably sew a 1/4" seam on my machine halfway through this project.  As a result my sewing was inaccurate and pieces didn't always match up.  This meant that I had to pay attention to every seam so the points and seam lines matched up, and that took a lot of time.

For borders I added a 1/2" white strip to act as a frame around the blocks.  Then 2" of the light blue and 3" of dark blue.  The blocks are 9" square.

White square begging to be quilted

Now that there's no hurry to finish I'm planning to do some really nice quilting.  In the large white squares I'll put a swirly design.  The borders will get something special, too.  Also horizontal and vertical lines on the whole thing to make the blocks pop and to hold it together.

I overdyed the backing fabric, hung it up to dry, and realized it has a crazy diagonal pattern.  I don't really like the dye job for this project anyway, so I'll buy a different fabric for the backing.  I may buy cotton batting to replace the poly batting I was planning to use.  I'll test the poly batting against a sample of cotton I already have, see which looks better.  I need to practice my free-motion quilting anyway.