FINISH: Actual 3rd Commission quilt--Color Stripes

I did not use that poison green solid for the back.....my daughter voted it down, via text, so I used a Marshall Dry Goods mottled blue from their Tie-dyed solids collection, found at my local fabric store.  No photo of back or finished quilt......sorry !

 That's right.....I've taken the quilts to be approved, and forgetting to take the last one that I posted about, my sister-in-law loved the other three......this one, the scrappy string quilt, and the orange barn star !  She took all three without quibbling about the prices that I asked.  

  I'm happy that she's happy, and I'm ecstatic that this commission is fulfilled. (In fact, I was so thrilled to be finished --with this 3 months of work--that I didn't even get a photo of the last quilt after it was quilted !

Finishing larger than the others, at 50" x 70",  knowing that this quilt had lots of black, and being fresh out of the dryer, I didn't dare lay it on my carpet for a photo (remember, I have two in-house cats!), and these people are not pet people. I used an all cotton batting, and I have to say that with this one, I really loved the flat look of the pieced top MORE than the crinkly look of the laundered quilt.   I'm finding that I now have to choose between cotton battings and polyester ones, dependent on the finished look that I want.  I love the drape of cotton, but I enjoy the puffiness of the polyester sometimes, and the fact that it DOESN'T CRINKLE since I tend to prewash my fabrics.  Of course, since I didn't prewash this batik fabric, being that it WAS cut as a jellyroll, it might have crinkled even with a poly batt.

   As far as the commissioning goes, I don't often take on requests, specifically because of the stress that I feel during the fulfillment of them, and also for the plain reason that I like to make what I feel like making.  Sounds pretty selfish, but I'm not actually selfish with the finished product, just how I spend my time.  She meant to make this commission easy by telling me to just make whatever I wanted since she loves any quilting that I do, but I worried the whole time that it just wouldn't turn out to be what she had in mind originally.

  As far as this quilt goes, I grabbed a batik jelly-roll that I have held onto for quite a few years, and was just going to sew it into strips of color-change.  That went just fine until it came time to trim up the left and right sides to add a  border.  Even though the strips showed no sign of bowing, having sewn alternately from each end of the strip,  somehow it just wouldn't trim up right.  I was forced to come up with another idea, so I resorted to the idea of quilts that I had seen where they had cut the assembled strips into columns, turning the center one upside down.

Turns out that I like the new design much better than the original boring one !  Who knew (probably just about  every quilter ever !)

 Mid-piecing I ran out of the black fabric, and found more yardage from a different manufacturer in my stash.  They looked so very much alike that I really don't think anyone will know the difference.  But with  battling tiny bits of the cotton batting clinging to the black fabric throughout the quilting stage, I hope to NEVER use a solid black fabric again !  I'm not even sure that it won't pill, but I told her to let me know if there's ever any problem.......probably scared her to death !

Anyway...........you might not see another quilt from me for awhile, if Spring opens up where I can stay busy outside.  Hope you've enjoyed this series of quilts !