liberty makes do too, a finish

some late afternoon snaps of my latest quilt finish, "liberty makes do too."

this quilt came about because i overcut fabric for my first liberty + crossweave quilt, "liberty makes do." i had to "make do" with all those extra pieces, so i came up with a new variation on the pattern for the first quilt and called this one "liberty makes do too," a play on words and reference to the original quilt.

there are nice close-ups of this quilt in previous posts and on instagram, if you'd like to see more of the fabrics upclose.

my littlest happily snipped any loose threads and ends for me as i finished up the project.

for the backing, i again selected one yard cuts of two liberty tana lawn prints. it makes for such a snuggly, luxurious backing. it's definitely a splurge, but for a small quilt i will do it.

another justification is that this is a lap quilt and the back gets seen quite often. it's not as if i've hidden all that lovely tana lawn away somehwhere.

as with the first quilt, this one has become a "church quilt" - one we take with us on sundays to keep our laps warm in the frigid AC that's always just a bit too nippy for us.

this quilt has d'anjo in pinks and betsey in blues on the back, a pairing of two of my favorite liberty classic prints. i guess that's another excuse for the backing splurge - i want a place to preserve large cuts of my favorite prints so i can see them and revel in them on occasion.

another luxury i put into this is the handquilting (aurifil 12 wt in white).

giving myself the time and leisure to handquilt a project is a gift to myself. the more quilts i have done, the more willing i am to slow down and do this, particularly on smaller-sized projects like this one.

i've always loved the binding phase of a quilt for the handwork involved and i'm leaning more and more towards doing the quilting that way, too.

above photo is me putting the final stitch into the binding of the quilt. i happened to be wearing my liberty of london dressing gown, made in emilia's flowers print, which is also in the quilt in the same colorway.

which brings me to the binding. even though it began to pill, which is annoying, i decided i still liked the herringbone striped blue flannel i used for the binding on the first quilt. it's a nice contrast to the other fabrics and colors in the quilt and the pilling seems to have tapered off with initial use. 

this quilt is now fully in church rotation use. in fact, i've had to tell the girls they can only use these quilts on sundays because they tend to want to use them for everything. because of the delicate nature of tana lawn, i'm keeping these for sunday best.

we're going to need 6 church quilts total, and the next one, "beauty for ashes," is already in the works, as is the search for a proper name for the quilt series.