A Grand Finish!

Start the drum roll please...I have my biggest finish ever to announce!
I started this quilt 18 years ago in a class called "Quilt in a Day". The fabrics were all pre-cut into strips for us, and in the class we sewed the strip sets, cross cut them and sewed the strips together in a "Trip Around the World" pattern.

I was delighted with the quilt top, which was going to be a quilt for my daughter when she moved out of her crib and into her "big bed".  She has just finished her first year of university, so I guess she doesn't really "need" it anymore! LOL!
The size is 72" x 93"- now what on earth was I thinking making it that huge! I had no idea what I was doing, as it was my first bed quilt, and I remember thinking that I'd like it to hang down over the sides of the bed. I wrote a blogpost about this quilt 3 years ago  - click here to read more about it, and to see me crawling around on my hands and knees thread basting. I could never do that again at this age :) Also in that blog post I wrote that I started it in 1990, so that's 20 years ago! That can't be right!?!
Anyway, I got the brilliant idea to hand quilt it...how hard could it be???!! Don't you love the enthusiasm and confidence of beginning quilters?!?!?
So I started by quilting all the vertical and horizontal seam lines. That didn't look like enough quilting, so I stitched diagonally across the blocks to emphasize the diamond design. This is the centre on the back of the quilt.
Can you see where I pieced the backing??

Then I reached the borders. I started to quilt a single line down the middle of the white border,  didn't like it and took that out. That border is empty, but I may yet go back and quilt a little cable in there.  In the second peach border I quilted these cute bows...they were fun to quilt!
And then in the 4 corners I quilted these cute little bears. That was fiddly quilting.

And the last border was just straight lines out to the edge. I've heard this design called "bars".  So I've called my quilting design "Bows, Bears and Bars"!

And then the binding. Since I made this so long ago, and was not anticipating taking this long to finish the job, I had not purchased any binding fabric. I looked for years for the outside border fabric, or any of the fabrics in the quilt to use for the binding. In May I finally found a perfect match - read about it here. The binding fabric has the same flowers on a peach background, and my border fabric has a blue background, but doesn't it look great?!?

I still can't believe that this is finished, and I feel a little sad, which is CRAZY! Someone asked me recently what my second oldest UFO is and I've been focused on this one for so long, I don't even know!