Spiraled Underground

Nearly 3 months ago, I posted my Big Batch HST tutorial, created as I was starting on my latest Spiraled quilt with its massive amount of hst's. Needless to say, it took a while to bring this one to completion, but I kinda gave it a push over last weekend, knowing my 3rd quarter Finish-A-Long report would be pitiful without it.

The objective in making this pattern again, was to see how it looked less scrappy. And I like it! {If you haven't seen the original Spiraled or Spiraled Jungle, click the links. They are basically the same 34"x36" design, with tweaks.} Another reason was that once I got my hands on yardage of the "Underground Route" print from Sara Lawson's Jungle Ave. line, I really wanted to see how it looked as a complete background. Again - I like! I chose the super pink "Word on the Street" text print for the spirals because I wanted them to be bold, and I just plain like it!

Quilting was done very similarly to what I did on my mini Swoon, basically using a few of the spirals as inspiration and then echoing using my walking foot as a guide. Overall, it gives a sort of willy nilly effect, but there was a rhyme and reason, and resulted in great texture, even before a wash. I used my super-sized cone of Aurifil 50wt #2021 (Natural White), which made me ridiculously happy. And then, I hit a stumbling block.

I had planned all along to use the black and white "Dotted Boulevard" as the border, topping it off with some matched binding. And though I was more than pleased with the border, after I'd sewn on a good quarter of the binding, I realized that I wasn't really happy with how the border and binding dots looked side by side. After a day of mulling, I removed the binding I'd stitched on and began auditioning other choices.

Except that I didn't like anything I tried! What to do? Then all at once I knew that to preserve that dotted border 'just so', I'd need to do a faced binding. So I turned again to OPQuilt's tutorial, which had served me well in the past. And yes, that was the look I'd been after.

For backing, I used a single piece of "urban sprawl" by Alexander Henry, one of those random stash purchases that I think was destined for this quilt.

So I'm really pleased with this new version of Spiraled, and I'm already thinking of another version I may need to try. Another day.