Now I can publish the final pic – the client has taken delivery and expressed her approval of the whole thing, and I hope she enjoys it for years and years.

I have been a bit carried away with blogging the various stages of making this quilt, to a degree I rarely have before, except for writing magazine articles, but they have been technique oriented/specific. and required detailed pics and instructions. In these posts I have tried to cover all the issues one comes up with in carrying out a commission – well, there are many others, but everything went well with this one, so what to do when things-go-wrong kinds of issues might be covered elsewhere some other time!

The binding is my very favourite method: cut on the straight, formed into one continuous folded strip and first attached to the front, then folded back and slip stitched down on the back side. The corners fall into mitre-shaped folds naturally. It is fully described as french binding in Mimi Deitrich’s book on quilt bindings,’Happy Endings’. The binding fabric – I bought in San Francisco in 1992; I’ve carted it around the world since then but until this piece I have never seriously contemplated using it for anything. My rule when buying fabric is that I only ever buy fabrics I really love; but more than once I have looked at this one and wondered, what on earth was I thinking that day?