The *No Longer Christmas* quilt (TropicalSoup)

Well, it's finally done! (yay!) And it's not even February yet...ha!

Once I was about halfway through with the quilting I started to feel the love again for this quilt - and just as well, because for a while there I felt like I was hardly on speaking terms with it. You may recall that I had a few hiccups with deciding on just the right quilting style, and (of course!) when I was exactly one-third of the way through quilting these dense straightish lines, I thought of the *perfect* quilting design. I guess I'll just have to make another...I certainly wasn't going anywhere near contemplating ripping all that stitching out!

Dense straight line quilting seems to be one of my fallback styles at the moment. It's very labour and thread-intensive, but I do love the texture. I was trying to make the lines a little less regimented and a little more organic, but I don't think I got there...it feels like the slightly wonky lines are more drunken monkey than they are organic freeform design. Hmm, will have to work on that.

I used a thin red-and-white stripe fabric for the binding, and resisted making bias binding since I figured there's already so much diagonal movement in the quilt that a vertical stripe on the binding would be a nice change. I used Rita from Red Pepper Quilt's amazing tutorial to practice attaching the binding completely by machine, and it worked really well - there are a few areas I needed to remedy, but on the whole it is a great technique. I still love hand stitching on the binding, but it's nice to have options, especially when time is short.

The quilt measures around 50" x 60", though it hadn't been washed at the time of taking these photos, so the crinkly goodness is still to come. Now just to wait until the festive season rolls around again!