Crystallising

The lace is all quilted, and I'd hoped to be able to leave the background unquilted as a lovely contrast, but (unsurprisingly) this wasn't feasible. With such dense quilting in places, leaving large unquilted spaces would have made it lumpy, distorted and wavy.

(lace quilted, no background quilting, untrimmed)

So I decided to quilt circles around the doilies. I quilted them using the dual-feed and a full-width foot, using the width of the foot as my guide. The first circle around each doily I moved the needle a few notches to the right. This is because the doilies have 'bumpy' edges, and if I'd quilted the full width from the outermost points, it would have looked too wide. Once the first circles were done, I moved the needle back to the centre position, and this keeps the rings looking more even.

(showing the background fullness requiring quilting and my starting palette up the top)

The circles are quilted in matching Bottomline thread. This helps it to fade into the background, and the smooth lines don't demand attention and therefore don't detract from the feature quilting. I'm rather lucky I didn't space them further apart though - any less and there wouldn't have been enough of it to either see the faint pattern, or to keep the quilt flat. As it is, I'm delighted with how it worked.

(fully quilted and trimmed ready to bind)

The finished size needs to be a maximum of 20in square, and I cut mine a bit over this, then marked my likely final space within that, allowing for a fair bit of distortion and resulting trimming and expecting it to finish at about 18.5in square. But there was very little distortion, and of course I couldn't bring myself to trim away more of the quilting than necessary, so it's going to finish up at about 19.99in square!

I laid out the quilt with my potential binding fabric (by coincidence, the same one as I used for Bogong Bower only days ago - although I may not have thought of it had it not been used recently) and upon return, I'm confident it's right, though I did try a couple of subtle, pale aquas before I made my final decision. It's now fully bound, with a hanging sleeve attached and just needs proper photos and a label before I parcel it up.