Eye Spy a car... a truck... a plane... a train!

Finally, I have pieced together the main part of Austy's quilt. I'm not so pleased with it as I measured wrong and made lots of mistakes when I made the blocks, this being my second ever quilt when I started on it (I just started and finished a few other quilts while this was underway because once I started this I realised how difficult it was for a beginner like me). Some of the blocks had seams pressed open (the rest didn't as I changed my methods as I learnt along the way), and the strippy blocks came out at 8.75" square, while the picture blocks varied between 8.25 and 8.5". Of course the finished block was meant to be 8.5" for ALL blocks so that once in the quilt they would all be 8". However, that wasn't to be so I needed top spend hours trimming and squaring up my blocks. This meant that some seam allowances were left very scant, and all the strippy blocks ended up with a mich thinner outer strip than the rest of the strips. Another problem was that I cut everything into the shapes they are in the block... I should have kept my triangles squares and cut them into triangles AFTER I seamed them. As a result, many blocks were off square and after all that trimming, making nice block joins was near impossible. I think about 2 in 5 block joins are near acceptable in my standards, the rest are ATTROCIOUS!!! But, we need to make mistakes to learn don't we? Someone could have told me how to do it all but I wouldn't have understood why. Now I know better, AND I understand why, so my future quilts will be much better. I'm just a bit sad that poor Austy gets two learning quilts (his baby quilt was my first quilt), so I am now thinking up a third quilt for him that will be much more worthy of hanging onto through the years.

What I am getting to is that this has been a very daunting project for me. My design was much more complicated than I thought it would be (although I'd probably be fine with it if I attempted it again now) and the size alone scared the bejeezes out of me. So getting this far has been somewhat of a challenge. Austy is dutifully impressed though (aren't two year olds the greatest when it comes to "Mummy Made-em's" appreciation?!) so now his excitement at seeing his quilt this near completion, is the push to make me finish. I am wondering whether or not to add a border. What do you think - 2" scrappy squares in left over blues and car/truck/plane/train fabrics with a tiny bit of red? It will make it slightly larger than a standard single bed quilt. Then I will bind it with navy????

Austy is sitting here pulling out these leftover fabrics and placing them on the quilt top saying "Mummy sewed a quilt for Austin! I love it, I love it! I really really do" Makes it all worth while.