Finished! Here’s the Houses quilt I’ve been making for my aunt in bits and pieces for the last month or so. It’s always satisfying to get a quilt done, especially since I’m also rearranging my sewing room at the same time and everything else I’ve been working on is in a state of total upheaval.

In the interest of time, and also because this quilt is pretty large to handle on my home sewing machine, I did the final quilting in a minimalist way. First, I stitched in the ditch along most, but not all, of the seams in the quilt. Then I chose a stylized leaf stitch from the assortment of decorative stitches on my sewing machine and sewed it around the center of the outer border. And that’s it!

For the binding, I picked the second fabric from the left, which I dug up out of my fabric stash.

I like the cheeriness of striped binding, so I cut the fabric along the length of grain (parallel to the selvages) to highlight the stripes in it. After I made the binding strips, I sewed the binding on using a machine-sewing-only technique (see tutorial here), and finished it with one of my favorite decorative stitches. In this photo, you can also see the leaf decorative stitch I sewed onto the outer border.

And here’s the quilt folded up and ready to go in the shipping box. Finis!