After several months of stitching, the end is in sight for
my first hand pieced quilt. A productive day at February’s Leeds MQG meant I
had only three pieces left to stitch when I got home that evening. Fortuitously,
I had a piece of fleece the right size and colour in my stash for the backing
and even more fortuitously, friends with a large table invited us over at the
weekend. They are quite happy for me to use their table to baste quilts, but it
might have been better to do it before a couple of glasses of wine rather than
after. What you can't see from the photo (and I didn't spot at the time) is that the right side of the backing is facing the wrong side of the quilt.
When I got the quilt out yesterday to start the quilting, I realised that the
backing was on the wrong way round. So after a few choice words, it was a matter of unpinning it and repining
it on our much smaller table. Luckily, there were no hiccups when I eventually started the quilting and I managed to complete the first (and maybe only) stage in a few hours. I’ve done an “echo and link” pattern around the
hexagons which will be enough to hold the layers together. The simple pattern looks rather nice from
the back so I’m tempted to leave it at that for the quilting, but I’ll have a
little ponder whether to add something in each of the hexagons.
