Theo's quilt finished (& Brit Thursday linky)

So this week I have a finish - hurray! The quilt in question is Theo's second birthday present. Does he need another quilt? Errr probably not, but he has a compulsive quilter for a mother and when I spotted this baby quilt a while ago I was desperate to make my own version.

The fabric it is based around is Alexander Henry's Smiles Around The World. I fussy cut each face and framed it with a Kona solid and then built up the houses with co-ordinating scraps.

The trees were made from a paper piecing pattern I bought from Protoquilt on Etsy. I used it the right way round twice and reversed it for the other two trees. The fabric for the trunks is a great wood effect cotton I found on eBay

The border is made from a Moda fabric and the binding is by Birch fabrics. They are very similar, but subtly different. If you think that was very clever and calculated on my behalf you are wrong! I simply bought the wrong one when I went back to buy binding fabric, but it's a happy mistake!



For the back I used more of the Moda dots, mixed with solids (the largest part is Kona Robin Egg) and paper-pieced Theo's name on the back using My abc's pattern by Diane Bohn.



For only the second time since I started quilting, I chose to use a longarm quilter. Partly as an experiment, partly because my sewing machine is playing up, and partly because I wanted this to be a "special quilt."

As a result of that decision a very strange thing happened (here comes the crazy bit!) I missed building the relationship that you do with a quilt when you quilt it! All the handling and feeling and feeding through the machine, and watching it change before your eyes. So when it came back to me in the mail I didn't actually like it! However over the last three nights as I have hand sewn the binding on to it, and handled it again, we have developed that relationship, and now like all my quilts, it's a thing I love.

So what's everyone else been doing?