First quilt of the year

Today is DS1's birthday. In the Autumn he sorted his shirts and brought me the ones he couldn't use any longer. I liked the colours, and I was very inspired by Stephanie's masculine Courthouse Steps quilt for his son. I stole the idea of using a "trousers colour" with the shirt fabrics.

The Chinese Coins pattern has long been on my list of quilts I wanted to make, and here is is all finished:

I named the quilt "Business Class" for all the business shirts in it. It is bigger than I thought it would be, 150 cm wide and 190 cm long. I wanted to baste it in the sewing class on Thursday and took my backing fabric, the finished top and the batting with me there. I used masking tape to hold the backing in place on the large, lovely table, spread the batting on top, and then the quilt top. Believe it or not, by top was wider than the backing! I could not go home for some fabric to add, so I stitched my Scandinavian Christmas block instead. Well, I got quite a bit of that done! The next morning I cut through the light grey backing, and cut a strip of the dark grey sashing and border fabric and added it between the halves. Then I vacuumed the hall floor, rolled away the carpet, cleaned the floor and started the layering all over again. I was VERY surprised to notice that the backing was still smaller than the top. Yes, I do own a tape measure, or  three, maybe five. I just didn't come to think of using one. On my knees I went, and spent some quality time there, stretching my hamstrings if nothing else. After machine quilting I simply cut the extra width of the borders to match the backing size. Friday evening and a good part of Saturday was spent with the binding, and I even added a label. Yesterday we went to his birthday party, delicious cake and coffee. He was surprised to see his shirts again. They matched their dark grey sofa nicely. - Why didn't I start earlier, you might ask? Well, we originally thought the invitation was for next Sunday, and I did want to baste the quilt on that good table in class instead of the floor. And by the way, he was born weeks early.

We have been getting new snow almost daily all this month. The young trees begin to bend under the snow load, but they will straighten up again when it gets warmer.