28 feet?

I think I have figured out why quilters measure in inches, not feet.  340" of binding sounds much shorter than 28 feet, for some reason.  I was happily attaching the binding to my pink quilt tonight, having finished all the quilting on it.  My son stopped by to say hello, and we chatted a bit about the quilt.  It is *very* heavy - mostly because it's quite a bit bigger than the quilts I usually work on.  So I told him how big it is (80" square), and we did a few quick calculations - that's almost 7 feet long, which is 49 square feet of quilt.  And the binding, he pointed out is 28 feet in length.  I looked at the pile of binding on the floor behind me, and said that I sure hoped I had measured correctly, because I didn't have any more of the white fabric left.

20 minutes later, I am able to say that Yes! I measured it correctly, and had about 29 feet of binding in hand.  It joined up nicely, and the quilt is now all trimmed up and waiting for the final step - tacking the binding down in back by hand.  I'll do that over the next couple of months while watching TV.  This stage can wait, because I do the handwork while my mother is visiting this Christmas.  I won't be able to sew during that time - at least not much - because my sewing room is also the guest room.  So, I'll try to put aside a few hand projects so I don't go into quilt withdrawl :)

I'm really happy with the way this quilt turned out.  It is a more intricate free-motion quilting design than I usually tackle.  To date, I've generally stuck with straight line or an all-over pattern, but this one I decided deserved attention to each block as a separate entity.  It has flowers in all the white spaces, and vines with leaves in the pink areas.  And it has hundreds of little threads for me to deal with now.

Oddly, my son declined my offer when I asked if he wanted this quilt.   In fact, he declined quite vehemently.  Could it have anything to do with the colour, do you think?  :)  Personally I like the colour much more than I expected to.  I'm not a big fan of pink, and in fact this quilt was an attempt to use up my pink scraps and get them out.  But I really like the end result, and I think this quilt is staying here.  It will make a nice cover the for the spare bed - in those few times between quilting when the room converts to a bedroom, anyway.  It's a bit too small for my bed so should fit the double bed just right.

This quilt may have convinced me to make a new quilt for my bed, in a different colour (the current one is blue), because when I put it on my bed for this picture, it changed the whole feel of the room.