That Quilt I Talked About Last Year

So last November I started making this quilt top. It took slightly longer than I thought and I then folded it up and it lived on the end of my couch for about four months. I fiiiiinally had enough coin to buy the batting and backing fabric (it's a mammoth - 2.4m wide and almost 3m long, so batting wasn't cheap.) I went luxe-ish, nice cotton batting which I'm liking so far (similar to this: Warm Company Batting ), and has made for a really smooth quilt which rolls and folds well. Complicating things further was the fact that the quilt top is bigger than the open space in the biggest room in my house:

George helped a lot, of course.

So, once I had a quilt top I had to find a space large enough to lay it flat and baste together the layers of the quilt, prior to the actual quilting. My lovely boyfriend has a studio about 20 minutes walk from my house so one Sunday night we went there to spread out the quilt He took photos!

I also took a perspective shot, approximately 300 safety pins in:

I opted for the safety pin method of basting, essentially because I am quite lazy and because I'm hand tying the quilt so I don't need to worry about negotiating them with a machine. Speaking of, I think I have some latent masochistic tendancies because hand tying a quilt this size suddenly seems like not such a fabulous idea, 1/30th of the way in. BUT this this is cute as hell and I have it draped over me while I'm working so it isn't all bad.

In new project news, a friend is having a baby quite soon so I just went a little nuts on Hawthorne Fabrics again. I'm excited about working on a baby quilt, just because I'm keen to have something that comes together quickly. I'm also on the look out for a nice fabric to bind the giant rainbow quilt with, suggestions in the comments welcome.