Half and Half Headboard

I finally finished my Two Colour Mystery quilt (the pattern is now officially called Half and Half).  It's been a fun and frustrating project as I tried new things and experimented.  

This was my first time participating in a mystery quilt.  I was intrigued when Joanne announced the two color mystery quilt on Canuck Quilter.  I have always enjoyed watching others' progress with mystery quilts, but haven't had the time nor faith in my color selection to participate myself.  But only two colors?  Hard to go wrong with that.  

Around the same time, my mother had asked for a wall hanging to cover the wall above her new full-sized bed.  (Interestingly enough, not a quilt for the bed itself... how long before she hints about that?  LOL)  Excellent.  I could join in on the mystery quilt and know what I was doing with it.  I let my mom pick out two fabrics from my stash and set to making the baby sized blocks.

The baby quilt resulted in six blocks and when I saw the final block layout, I decided I needed two more.  I enjoyed the quilt-a-long and was amazed at all the potential ways to lay these out.  I sent the choices to my mother and this is the final layout she chose.  I anticipated making a plain blue border around the whole thing, but between my rapidly dwindling blue fabric and the layout I opted to simply extend the background to the edges.  I think that works quite nicely with this design.

Then things got complicated.  I made a few mistakes in measuring and cutting in lining up the borders before I got it right.  And I somehow missed reading the trick to doing the mitered border corners and ended up joining the corners with a Y-seam.  I am so terrible at reading ALL of the instructions.  My bad.

The borders were one inch wider than I needed to account for shrinkage while quilting.  Turns out not to have shrunk much.  I was glad to have the extra edge, regardless.

Then how to quilt it?!?  I stewed over that for more than a week.  None of my free motion ideas spoke to me and a variety of straight-lined quilting options were unappealing.  Unfortunately at the time I was trying to quilt this the other QAL participants had finished their projects with a bare minimum of quilting (or simply tied it).  I settled on stitching around the stars and straight-lined along the stripes.  It works; it's good.

Now things got seriously challenging:  this quilt was to be mounted on a frame.  Building the frame turned out to be straightforward.  We discussed hanging it on the wall above the bed, but I decided it would be easy enough to add a couple of legs and fasten it to the bed frame.  It would save me trying to hang it level (which we could still do, if the legs are problematic). 

Normally I square the quilt, mark or cut it for binding, then bind it.  So how to mark and cut this so it looked square and true on the frame?  And what kind of binding? I did a lot of googling before attempting anything.

I ended up measuring 3¼ inches from the block edges as my quilt edge, bound it, then cut off the excess leaving a ½ inch of the border to wrap around the width of the wood frame.  Why bother binding it when it's getting stretched over a frame?  Well, I figured it would give the piece a nice clean edge.  Plus if the quilt is ever removed from the frame it could become a usable quilt simply by tacking down the binding. 

I stapled the binding to the frame.  I have to say it looks pretty good given that I made up my plans as I went along.  I sewed a tiny label to the binding, but it's hidden by the frame.  So I signed the frame as well with the date and pattern.  We had started to attach the legs, before we realized it wouldn't fit in the car to deliver to my mom's place.  So quilt, legs, screws and tools all went to her place and we assembled it there.

Ta-da!  She loves it, of course.  The peach of the lighter print shows up more on the last photo than the others. 

Will the frame hold (or warp)?  Will the quilt sag?  As we mounted it on the legs I came up with a new worry - will it fall down?  Ha!  Time will tell how well I put it all together.  For now, it's a done deal!

Sharing with:
My Quilt Infatuation - Needle & Thread Thursday
Alycia Quilt - Finished or Not Friday
A Quiltery - Put Your Foot Down
Nina-Marie - Off the Wall Friday
Quilt Fabrication - Midweek Makers
Quilting & Learning - Free Motion Mavericks