February Colour Challenge

The quilt for my February colour challenge is complete, as I mentioned a couple of days ago.  I took a fabric swatch to my quilt shop, and compared it to her swatches of Freckles fabric. It looks like what I have is an odd dye-lot of "eggshell". Mine has a distinct green tone to it, while the sample does not.  Oh well.  She's going to order it for me, and I'll see how it looks once it arrives.  For just binding, I think it's going to be fine.

Once that arrives, I can figure out how I want to quilt this.  And buy some backing fabric - oh boy.  More stash damage, because I don't have anything here that is suitable.  Good thing another local quilt shop is having a sale this week.  I'll have to get down there on Saturday.

Since this is a colour challenge update, I thought I would also update you on my progress on the Jan colour challenge quilt.  I had basted it a few weeks ago.  But the backing fabric was about 1 inch too narrow.  I was going to just live with it (whack some off the borders all around). But then last week I stumbled on a blog posting about diagonal piecing for backings. 

I can't find the blog post I read, but it appears that this is the source for it.  My backing was, as I said, 1" too narrow. And about 6" longer than I really needed.  I spent a little time trying to figure out a formula to make sure I had enough fabric, but my brain wasn't computing.  So I just threw caution to the wind and cut.  It worked perfectly.  I ended up with a backing piece that was about 2" more than the quilt on each edge.  Now that I found John Flynn's page, I'll try that next time (and I'll probably work the math myself, to understand how the formula works).

The quilt is now under the needle, and almost done - just 2 sides of the border to go.