Recently in one of my art quilt FB groups there was comment on when members regarded a work as being ‘finished’ and I was a little surprised how much variation was in the answers. Although many art quilt makers regard the end as completed binding or facing, my personal view is that it’s not ‘done’ until hanging sleeve is on the back and my initials are free machine embroidered on the front, but as I say there’s an array of other answers.

Going back to the step before that, the treatment of the edge of the work, a year ago I wrote: “One enduring legacy of traditional quilt making is that most art quilt makers carefully bind or face the straight or straightened edges of our quilts. These are the standard procedures for those utilitarian predecessors from which art quilts descend, and I myself have mostly bound or faced quilts, even ones with extremely irregular shaped outer edges, eg., Pahoehoe. 

That facing was challenging and a bit finicky in parts, but was worth it – because it would have been an entirely different quilt if all four irregular edges shapes had been chopped in a straight line. I have seen other artists deal with this issue by placing the whole irregular shaped composition onto a rectangular backing and then treating that as the surface design to be quilted and ultimately faced or bound – ho hum.…I need to think more about this idea, but I was really pushed to thinking about it recently when I saw how one artist did some lovely improvisational piecing of units with repeated shapes and skillful use of colour. When it reached the point of finishing the edge, she got out her straight ruler, trimmed off all the interesting little irregular shapes, and placed a facing along each of the four straight edges. The result was ‘nice’, but much less interesting than it could have been.”