More tops

I finished the tops from the sneak preview last week. Well, maybe not finished, but they're as complete as they're going to get for awhile.



I'm putting this photo first because the colors in the quilts kind of distract from the overall look I was going for. I actually colored a diagram in on graph paper and decided I wanted this band of dark diagonally across the center because the typical half dark and half light log cabin block didn't work when there were only 3 of them. There was always one block that faced the wrong way, or some weird, random pattern would emerge, and while it was pretty, I thought this was prettier. My husband looked at all of my colored pencil sketches and picked this layout as his favorite too.



So here it is in the Christmas fabrics. Mistakes galore! I am glad this one is for my mother, who doesn't sew at all. She will be so much less likely to pick out all of the flaws than my quilter mother-in-law.



And the batiks. I nearly went with a white instead of the purple on this one, but I liked the idea of no real break from the colors. I'm glad I didn't go with the safe choice now, because I think it would have turned out nowhere near as striking.

My husband thinks these are too small as is, so I am toying with the idea of a border or two and thicker binding like on my disappearing nine patch. I already purchased the binding material for the Christmas fabric one and only have enough to do a half inch binding (still twice as wide as what I normally do, but a 1/4" smaller than my disappearing nine patch binding). I'm thinking maybe a small 1 to 1 1/2 inch border, but am not sure how that would work as these were made entirely from 2 1/2" cuts of fabric. All of the sudden throwing a different measurement in there scares me. Though I guess I could rip it all out if I didn't like it.

I have awhile to think about it, as I plan on quilting the other top I finished back in September before I haul these two back out of the closet. In the meantime though, I'm open to suggestions!