After a very, very long time, tonight I finished the blocks for my Irish Chain quilt.

Irish Chain block construction finished

Sorry about the quality of the photo (using a cell phone and taken at night) and the fact my lounge room floor isn’t quite big enough for it. There are other floor spaces in the house for laying it all out and pinning it once the borders are done, but that will probably mean the rumpus room, which is downstairs and colder and I can’t watch TV there, which is what I’m trying to do right now.

This is intended to be Dave and my wedding quilt. If I can get it finished by October, it will only be 10 years late!

However, I saw the book of patterns and the fabric several years before we ever got engaged, let alone married. I ended up ordering the two green fabrics (you can’t tell in the photo, but the light green pattern is actually serpent dragons) from Australia and getting the silver and blue from the shop where I worked. I didn’t know what size it was going to be way back then so buying the right amount of fabric was a bit of a gamble.

I had been worrying that I’d have to add in some new fabrics (in a 15 year different style) to do the borders. But now that I’ve crawled across it all a few times, tape measure in hand and done some scribbly maths on a sheet of paper, I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to do my borders from the fabric I have already. This makes me very happy, since I didn’t really want to introduce a new colour of style.

I’ve been laying out the various options at the edge of the top, and I’m pretty certain this is what I’ll use, with a thin strip of dark blue, about 5″ of the pale dragons and then a binding of the dark green. (I’d have liked to try a blue binding as well, but I don’t have enough for that.

Planned borders for Irish Chain (excuse the distraction of my shadow)

I’m feeling rather smug and pleased with myself right now.

Which is probably why I’m refusing to think about actually quilting it.