No More Monkeys Quilt (back)

The 5 minute blocks were made up with no plan in mind, so I had extras after having pieced most of them into a quilt top: No More Monkeys, [see previous post]. I took four of them and began trying various orientations until I came up with a nice pinwheel of sorts. That's when I decided to use them for the start point of a quilt back for the completed No More Monkeys Quilt top. 

Note use of camouflage pink for
one of the five minute squares 
sections. Ran out of fabric!

I had some dark brown scraps from my Elephant Walk quilt...just enough to make a mitered border for the central pinwheel. Also, there was a narrow strip of red & pink striped fabric just long enough to do a miter border out from that. 

For a few days I was not sure what I might use for a border beyond that border. Then I remembered some old wine & beige ticking fabric I had bought on sale around 1995. Really drab stuff for which I had never found use. On a hunch I held it against the pinks and browns, and it worked! Finally, a use for it! 

   Bordered, though, the pinwheel seemed to be missing something. That's when I decided a fabric yo-yo with a button center might be the element needed. Brown won out as the color and my button jar and fabric scraps complied and supplied. Sometimes you just need a dot of something else.

Next came the two-fabric binding. "Somehow" (!) it was cut wrong at first and had to be cut and pieced a second time. In the ultimate version, it had three strips of fabric instead of two, and one of the strips was completely hidden in the final fold. Pretty sure I need to revisit the how-to basics of two-fabric binding.

My quilt top top-stitching of the shapes (square, rectangle, circle, triangle) did not show up on the quilt back as well as I had hoped, so I wound up hand-stitching (Gasp!) some rick rack to better

define the shapes for quilt back viewing pleasure. Who would have guessed there would be something else to do after the binding was completed? 

For me...for a while, at least...there'll be: "No More Monkeys"!!!!