So I started this in March of last year and finally completed it this weekend. I will preface this with saying I don't particularly enjoy quilting. I sort of enjoy designing/piecing. But, I find the quilting/binding to be quite tedious especailly with large quilts. This one is approximately queen sized. I don't mind quilting small lap quilts but anything more than that is a bore and ends up being put off for years.
In my living room I have black floor tiles and one red wall. I have a futon couch which is primarily there as a bed for out of town guests. Nobody ever actually sits on it except the cat. It's rather sad that the living room is the largest room in my house and the only thing we ever do in there is watch TV. In reality I rarely watch TV but Mr MC watches regularly. To the right there is a black leather loveseat recliner and to the left a large screen TV on the wall.
I had a 25 year old quilt on the futon couch and one of the cats pretty much shredded it. It is now in the bin for Monday morning trash pickup. My original idea was to make a black and red checkerboard quilt. I thought having these large squares would make everything go faster. And for cutting and piecing it did. After that it lingered and lingered.
I also didn't want to buy any fabric so some of my red squares are orange or dark pink. Based on the picture the various shades seem to blend well. The only fabric I bought was the black with red polka dots that is used for the borders and binding but you can't really see it. The quilt back is a rather large scale floral with black background.
The squares started out as 12" but after sewing they are 11.5". I only stitched in the ditch of the squares in each direction and then again diagonally with a wavy stitch that I often use when quilting because it doesn't need to be as precise as a straight stitch. Unfortunately, this loose quilting is causing drag lines on the bottom row that hangs over the futon. When it's laying flat it looks normal. I assume it's because of my rather light quilting. At this point I don't care but I may add a bit more quilting to the bottom row later. Also I think I made it too wide because there are two more rows tucked around the back.
Outside of the puckering I'm quite happy with it. The colors work so much better. The old one was dull and pale. Also, there is some bearding going on so you can see the little white beads which I've decided to ignore for now. They aren't noticeable unless you're up close.
The quillt:
The narrow butted binding:
The back:
I'd also like to say a word about binding. I do not sew by hand at all. I might sew on a button but that's about it. Hand sewing is physically painful for me after years of mouse use. So the way I do bindings it to double them up, sew from the front, flip it around to the back and then stitch in the ditch from the front. This has mostly worked for me in the past but I never really liked my corners because of the bulk.
So here I did it more more like this video where she trims away some of the bulk. In retrospect I think I could have also trimmed a bit from the first two sides as well so I plan to do that in the future. I have a quilt that was professionally quilted that has been waiting to be bound for about ten years.
Butted binding corners