Finally Finished.

My little "Not Quite Civil Pineapple" is finished! It is 8.75" square, with 447 pieces. It's taken me a while to get back to it. The concensus on whether to border it or not was roughly 50/50 - thank you for your suggestions/comments! My problem was that I had no yardage of any of the fabrics, since it is totally made from 1" wide (or less) strips that were trimmings from squaring up larger quilt blocks. Besides being very narrow, none of the strips were much more than 6 or 7 inches long. My friend Sandi Mac gave me these trimmings, and all her yardage for these blocks is in her other studio... in Florida. A little too far to go for border fabric! I had nothing in my stash that worked either (hard to believe, I know, for those of you who know how extensive my fabric stash is...) So I decided to just go with the old traditional finish of a Pineapple quilt and simply bind it. I have added a narrow corded piping in a light tan, before the olive green solid binding (thanks Lee for the suggestion of using a solid.) Solids are another thing I don't have many of in my stash, but this was

in a bundle from a George Siciliano workshop a few years back, and I thought it was perfect.
I bound it twice!  More than twice actually. The first time, after binding was all sewn on and I started to hand stitch it to the back, I realized I just had not made the binding quite wide enough. The addition of the corded piping adds another two layers of fabric in that seam allowance, giving you a total of nine layers- my binding just wasn't wide enough to wrap to the back over all that thickness and completely cover my line of stitching without looking like it was pulled too tight. So I ripped it all off and cut a wider binding. Stitched it all on again and had the hand-stitching 90% finished. At the last corner I realized there was an issue with the mitred corner of the binding - so I once again "unstitched" one entire side (and two corners) and re-did the corners and the joining seam. So it DOES feel good to be done! I'm pleased with it. It's not my usual colour palette, but it's a good exercise to step outside one's usual "comfort zone" occasionally. It's done. And "done is good."

Piece!
Linda

"Setting a goal is not the main thing. It is deciding how you will go about achieving it and staying with that plan." ~ Tom Landry