Sweet Astrodelic

Sweet Astrodelic is finished. I'm happy to report that it had a successful run through the washer and dryer. It shrank up a bit to 41"x41", a good size for a baby quilt. I used leftovers from the fat quarter bundle to make a scrappy binding.

Here is the backing, a soft cream with yellow flowers and roosters. On quilts this small, it's so nice to use a single cut of fabric for the backing.

I tried to capture the relative "coarseness" of the fabric in this photo. The weave is more open than most quilting cottons, and I worried that I wouldn't quilt or wash well. However, it turned out fine. And it isn't rough to touch at all, just sort of visually more open. The roosters are about 3/4" tall, so you can see the scale of my stippling.

I will definitely donate this one to Project Linus, and here's their cute label. I machine stitched the binding to the back first, then did a machine edge stitch on the front of the binding. Not as graceful as the traditional method with hand sewing, but very fast and sturdy.

I admire those bloggers who take such nice "glamour" shots of their quilts. Mine are...adequate. Here's Sweet Astrodelic clipped to the back of our boat. 

And here it is, held up via the Handy Husband method. Love that post-dryer crinkle! The New Orleans Industrial Canal and a tourist river boat are in the distant background. The boat with the pointy bow sticking out just to the right of the quilt is rumored to have cost $20,000,000 new. That's a lot of fabric, my friends. 

The boatyard is still working on our (not $20M) boat. This afternoon I was amused to see a guy hanging over the edge. He's sitting on what looks like an orange Hippity-Hop (remember those?) but is actually an inflatable ball fender. It's used to keep the boat from banging against hard surfaces, but Khahn is riding it cowboy style instead. Most of the yard workers speak only Vietnamese, but they completely understood me when I said, "I gotta get a picture of this!" and everyone laughed.