Something Finished, Something Started

Something Finished.....
My Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend quilt came back from the quilter a few weeks ago. I mailed this one off to someone I'd never worked with before, but she came on good recommendation. This is about 52" x 80", and will be used by my daughter, first as her bed quilt, and then as a secondary blanket when I think she is old enough to use this quilt without damaging it. I love all of the modern pink and green prints I used. It's very lively and fresh.
The quilting...It's a good story and a horrid story. The Good: inexpensive. I mean very inexpensive ($15). I paid more to ship it than it cost to have it quilted. Generally, the quilting looks good. No huge puckers. Pretty pattern.
The Bad: It's quilted in rows, which isn't necessarily a bad, except that this originally had a 3" wide yellow border. She quilted right through the border on the sides and partially through it on the top and bottom. That looked absolutely wretched. I pulled it out, all 12+ rows of it that went thru the border, and painstakingly knotted and burried short 3" pieces of threads. In her defense, I was forewarned by the person that uses her regularly that the edges are sometimes not so good and have to be cut off. I just didn't know how to heed this warning reasonably. I'll probably use this quilter again, I just won't put a border on the quilt!

Sadly, this quilt has my absolute most embarrassing and hideous binding work. I only have myself to blame there (though the quilting adventures did play into how I chose to bind it). I used the yellow that was the border as the binding. It's closer to a 1/2 " binding, which I don't love. Plus the edge of the quilt does "wiggle" a bit in a few places and that is hard to disguize with binding there. If it weren't staying right here in my house, I'd have ripped it off altogether, and redone the binding. The corners are ugly. It's, like I said, not good, but not so bad that I'll lose too much sleep over it.

Here's a couple looks at the flowery pantograph done in a soft pink thread. The backing is largely white with a wide pink pieced stripe. This quilt is of a size that I could have done the quilting, but I wanted to test out a new machine quilter on a piece that wouldn't be critical if it was not perfect.

Something Started...
My daughter's birthday is 2 months away, and I have decided to make a smocked dress for her. I found this fantastic Michael Miller Autumn Fairies material on sale. The color is more sky blue - thanks to a 15th day of rain and clouds here, all my colors are wshed out and dull. That's the assortment of floss colors that I will choose from. I have already shirred the fabric. Hopefully I'll be finished up with other dulling priorities this afternoon so I can start on this tonight.

...and a close up of the fairies here. There's a tiny bit of gold leafing throughout the fabric. It's really sweet and lovely.