The Scariest Thing

The scariest thing about finishing up a quilt is trimming the excess backing and binding away, and making the quilt "square." What I mean by "square" is four 90-degree corners and perfectly straight sides. Since the longest straightedge I have is half the length of my quilt, I have had to resort to more devious means of getting a perfectly straight edge.

I use a piece of string. I tape it down to the floor, or table, line up the quilt, set out my 16" and 12" right triangles and pull the string taut.Then I cut along the line.  Yes it's tricky, but there's nothing worse than a wobbly edge, or a crooked one.

I was pleased with this one. I had worked very hard to make sure it was square and the two opposing sides were the same length before I sent it to Chris to be quilted. And when it came back, it was very close to "true" so it didn't need any fiddling.

I've added the binding to the back of the quilt, now all ("all!") I have to do is hand sew it down to the front.

Oh, do you want another picture of the front?

and here's another one.

This little imperfection bugs me, but damn if that wasn't the hardest thing to get right. The quilt was extremely complicated to put it all together and get it right. So much tiny stuff to line up. In the end it was more important to get the quilt to lie perfectly flat.  I figured there would be so much going on in this quilt few people would notice unless I pointed it out.  Oh well. However, it does remind me that it's important to leave the evidence of you hand in a quilt, so nobody will think it was made by a machine.  It's not perfect, but it's perfect.