The Great Aussie Quilt finished!

Yesterday was a marvelously rainy day! All day!!! Which meant I couldn't do laundry (it doesn't dry) and I couldn't take Choco for a walk (she doesn't like to get wet) and Tetsu didn't even need dinner so I didn't have to go out grocery shopping. I love rainy days like this especially since it is summer vacation and I didn't have any teaching scheduled either! I can sew!!!

I spent the morning working on a project for a couple of my students (more about that tomorrow) and then I finished machine quilting the Great Aussie quilt and putting on the binding. I had such fun with the quilting on this. Just a lot of playing around and it didn't really matter whether I followed lines or what.

The animals in this quilt are from the original pattern but I made up my own flower patterns and added a dragonfly. There were so many cute Australian animals to choose from but I really didn't know any of the animals except for the koala, the crocodile and the frog so I limited myself to those (and I also wanted to make a wall hanging not a bed quilt.)

I quilted around all the figures and shapes and then did some background quilting of flowers and leaves hoping for a tropical look. I used an odd variegated thread for this and the dark parts are a bit strange. Maybe I should stop using this thread that leaves such obvious dark squiggles here and there... I'm trying to pretend they are vines in a tropical forest... Inside the leaves and animals I used a lighter pink variegated thread and that was a lot of fun to do and very forgiving of mistakes.

Since the blocks were so densely quilted I left the lattice and borders plain which may or may not have been a good choice. Once I got to the border I found that it stretched a bit even using the walking foot and so I started in doing repair work. This happens so often to me even with careful measuring. I should just learn to take off a half inch when cutting out a border. I ended up taking out a few inches of border and adjusting the length hit and miss. The border print is busy enough that it doesn't really show and if it bothers me I suppose I can quilt it a bit more and hide the wrinkles. I'm leaving it for now...

Now I still need to get a sleeve onto this and get a label on the back.

Thank you Lorraine for the inspiration and the pattern!