Two blocks challenge: done and dusted

My piecing has slowed down this month, but at least my quilting has benefited.  Here's the quilt I made for the AHIQ two-blocks challenge.

I bound it with a really pretty Monaluna print that, honestly, I would have liked to use for something else, but of all the options I tried it was the best by quite a distance, so binding it became.

I started this on 25th April and finished piecing on 27th June 2017.

Started quilting on 1st October and finished on 29th November this year.

The wadding is the 70/30 all recycled mix that I am using for most of my utility quilts and it was quilted with this handquilting thread, which was new to me.  I was perfectly happy with it, though to be honest I bought it mostly because it came on wooden reels rather than plastic.  

Mr SewSlowly says it looks "old-fashioned" in a way that leaves me not entirely sure if that's a compliment or not, but I like it a lot. The thing I like the best is that it is a finished quilt, in a year when finishes have been few and far between!

A quick detour

I am still thinking about my map quilt, but haven't done much.  Instead I have been putting a bit of extra time into the hand sewing, since I have a quilt heading towards done.  I have also made two cushions (or pillows).  I've never tried this before but it's been kind of fun.  

Here's one with a pillow (or cushion) pad, though not one that's quite big enough, just one that was lying around.

 And a second one, which is smaller.

I have one more of these in the works, but I'm still quilting it.  

Scrapping the bottom of the scrap barrel

For once this quilt played nice and yesterday I had a happy couple of hours just quietly chugging away without too many dilemmas.  I went from this

 to this.

But now the fun starts.  The photos are a bit misleading in terms of proportion and in real life this is not long enough by maybe 6 inches or a bit more.  At the moment it looks slightly squat, which doesn't please me.  However, I am about out of most fabrics.  I have plenty of dark blue, and of the lilac and dark green in the little squares and I have about ten squares , mostly of the light blue shirting and the plaid, cut and not yet used.  No more of the white sashing shirt though.  

The obvious answer would be to work with the dark blue, but I am wondering if having too much dark at the bottom might mess the balance of the whole quilt.  I'll probably tinker around just to be sure but failing that I guess I either have to look for another fabric or consider doing something completely different across that bottom strip.  For now, I'm letting it stew.

Not too far to go

Again, not much to say about this, except that it's growing.

The dark blue bits on the left look a bit heavy, but they'll slim down once they're stitched into place. Suddenly it feels like there's not too far to go.

Upended

No sewing last week as it was half-term and there were all sorts of kid-related shenanigans going on instead.  I try to plan ahead for these moments and have piles of mindless piecing ready, so that I can keep ticking over, but this project doesn't lend itself to that approach.  As a result I was extremely happy to get back to it this morning.

I have decided to stick permanently with the rotated version of this quilt, although I haven't yet worked out a satisfactory way to add the extra bit of length it needs as a result.  I mostly worked today on accumulating more pieced chunks to work with.  I have run out of proper pieces of two fabrics now - you can see how a lot more of my basic squares are made up of scraps now.

These two pictures give a rough idea of where I'm headed - there's not much more sewn down than there was last time, but you get the gist.