BINDING FABRIC QUEST

I doubt that any of you faithful readers woke up this morning wondering how the outcome of my fabric search for the binding of my Calder quilt came out.....but just in a case .....here's the details.

Gosh, this sounds so self-serving doesn't it......you all have lives and can't possibly give a hoot what my decision is......but that's all that's on my mind at the moment.....call me compulsive!

We don't have a lot of quilt shops in our area....Asheville Cotton is by far the largest. It's staffed with helpful employees and has enough fabric to bust most quilter's budgets. However, finding the perfect fabric was a bit more challenging....esp. a white with some black and preferably something that would echo/compliment the many circular designs of the quilt. Almost all the white fabrics with black designs were too strong and the ones where the greater percentage was white would have had big problems with the black design shadowing through.

This all over polka dot will be much easier to achieve good motif placement on a narrow binding then the previous one I tried, however, in the shop it didn't look like shadowing would be a problem....but now that I have it at home in good light, I suspect it will.

So my option would probably be to add a very thin interfacing to the wrong side and then perhaps depending upon the weight of this 'new' fabric......use a single fold binding method. I much prefer double fold because I believe it helps to support the edges better....allowing the quilt to hang straighter/flatter.

Before I even headed out on my shopping trip, I considered another fall back idea. I'd use the same white fabric as the quilt's background and then doing a Mary Stori trademark, I'd bead the binding......in units of beads to create circles......

........or randomly spaced single beads to read as dots. These last two examples used fabric that is much wider than a typical binding.....but you get the idea.......

If you are like me, when you get to this part of a quilt, you want to finish and move on to another one of the zillion ideas on the 'to-do' list. However, even stumbling a bit on this binding is just one of those things......not good but certainly not earth shattering. The goal is to create the best possible piece....every part of it. So, the extra challenge to overcome a part that didn't work as planned is okay with me. I still look forward to the 'happy dance' that will follow the very last stitch!!