Chain Linked Quilt Finish

There was a mysterious box on my doorstep last week, a delivery by the post.  Okay, maybe not so mysterious, because I knew it was from Angie of 5 Little Monkeys Quilting.  The mystery, though, was how my Chain Linked Quilt had been quilted.  We had talked about some ideas, in general, but I had left it up to her to surprise me in the end.

And it is beautiful!  She did an allover oval or bubble type shape in gray thread.  It works perfectly against all those squares, and I love it!

I had finished the top in early January and it was in the processing of ripening in the quilting queue (aka sitting folded on the futon in my sewing room) when I happened to win a giveaway by Elizabeth for a discount on quilting by Angie.  Oh, happy day!  Angie had quilted another quilt for me in the past, so I knew she did very nice work.  I hastily put together a backing and sent it off to her for longarm quilting.

Yeah, about that "hastily" part...  I was too impatient to unpick a couple seams and fix my backing so that the end squares wouldn't be cut off, and I knew that when I sent it. 

Well, how about we just call it a design decision.  Or something.  In a way, I kind of like it, actually.

The binding is another one of those things that reflects my impatience.  I started out thinking I'd hand sew it down on the back, so I deliberately took a more generous seam allowance when machine sewing it onto the front.  But when I started to fold the binding over and put the binder clips on and stared at that long, long line of binding to be stitched down...well, impatience kicked in again and I decided to machine sew the binding down.

As you can imagine, with that bigger seam allowance, sewing in the ditch from the front side of the quilt didn't manage to catch the binding all the way along, so after about two feet of that foolishness, I took it off, flipped it over, and started to machine sew the binding down on the back, knowing full well it would probably look heinous on the front side.  And the stitching line on the front does indeed go off the rails like a crazy train, but that train just kept-a-rollin'.  It is done, friends.  D-o-n-e, DONE, and that's all I've got to say about that.  At least it lies flat.  Okay, that was one more thing to say about that.

I still love it, with all its idiosyncrasies!  

The Chain Linked pattern is by Amy Smart of Diary of a Quilter. I mentioned the fabrics used in my previous post here.

I'm linking to Quilting by the River's Linky Party Tuesday.  Come join the fun!

Also, linking up to A Stitch in Time 2012 June Finishes at Such a Sew and Sew!