Ready for quilting

It's always an exciting day when I can say:  "My quilt top is finished and ready for quilting."  And here I am.  This is a rough photo of the quilt top.  It turned out to be about 88" x 88" and it's just too large for me to machine quilt on my Bernina, so it's off to my long arm machine quilter tomorrow.  When it's finished, it will be transformed and be, well, finished!  The quilting adds so much.  



I initially didn't think this quilt needed any borders, but once I put the mandala blocks together, it was obvious it needed to be "framed."  You can look back a few blog posts to see how I completed the outer pieced log border. This tree stump I cam upon snowshoeing  in the woods was my inspiration for the woodsy look of the border:

Once I finished the borders, I pinned the quilt top up to hang from the ceiling and looked at it for days.  It still needed something and then it just hit me one night;  I would add a 1/4" dark brown strip to offset the borders.  I did something unorthodox by machine appliqueing this strip to the quilt.  Well, I was NOT going to rip apart all those seams to insert the conventional piping or folded strip.  I have never seen this done, but I like the way it turned out and I would do it again.  Handling the entire quilt top to applique this border strip was not difficult.

So, now as I often do, I have changed the name of this quilt to:  "Woods and Wildflowers", of course.