Peach Melba

I think it's about time that visitors to my blog were greeted with something more inviting than a bruised and swollen ankle, so here's a peek at my DQS10 quilt. I'll be photographing it properly tomorrow, so more photos then...

As I edit photos, I'm eating some delicious Peach Melba icecream we brought home from Wendy's after swimmign yesterday. It's fantastic; the peach tastes seriously like fresh peaches - yum! I might have to get some peaches tomorrow and enjoy some more stone-fruit while it's still efffectively summer.

I ended up using black Bottomline thread and a very small button-hole stitch to machine applique the birds to the circles, and it worked pretty well.  It would have been better if I'd remembered prior to sandwiching the quilt; that way the black stitches on the back would have been hidden, and the birds would have sat further forward on the trapunto circles, but they are still very effective.

Thanks to a few comments on my blog, I added a narrow black piping to my binding, and used the diagonal stripe I'd originally intended. I'm really happy with the result. I cut 2 sets of narrow strips for the binding; the print 1 3/8in wide and the black 1 5/8in wide. I joined the sets end to end, then joined the 2 long strips side-by-side with a 1/4in seam, which resulted in a 2.5in binding strip. I pinned and pressed it in half really carefully to achieve an even 1/8in of black over the fold all along, then machined it to the quilt as normal, except starting on the bakc instead of the front, so that when it was folded over to the front for hand-stitching, the 'piping' showed. It was fiddly, but it's neat and mitred well. If you're using this method, it is really important to use bias seams to initially join the strips, to make sure that the seams on the two different fabrics are off-set, and make sure none of these seams fall at a corner - the added bulk of the seam joining the two fabrics leaves little margin for even more. Any guess how I know these things?!