I’ve been working on this quilt for a while. Figuring out how to back it and quilt it and bind it was driving me a little crazy for a while. But I seem to have solved those problems and finished the quilt. It’s now for sale on my Etsy store.
How do you decide how to finish a quilt? And why was this one so difficult to finish?
For me, a great deal of it came down to the backing and binding. I simply quilted this with a grid pattern using “stitch in the ditch” techniques with black thread. With a lighter colored thread, I might have had a less visible grid, or used white to make the brighter and warmer colors glow a little bit more. Instead, the black grid seems to make the colors pop — just as the black border does. So black was the right choice. But before I got to black, I tried a beige, a gray, and a patterned fabric. None of them looked quite right.
I wound up using the same fabric I used on the Noble Coat’s sleeves for the edge-binding.
I had enough of it, it matched nicely and with some subtlety to the rainbow, and also matched the aesthetic that I often seek to create in other works — of a series of connections to the mystical and the starry and the energies of light (stars and rainbows) — but also to the geometric expressions of those ideas of mystical, starry lightness.
So, this quilt is now for sale — a little too narrow to be a crib quilt, and a little too long to be just an infant quilt. But still stunningly beautiful, and hand-made.
