Watermelon Squares Finished

Watermelon squares is finished!

 

I quilted it with horizontal and vertical lines various shades of pink and green. 

The quilting is intended to look like a plaid. It has a spectrum of pink threads in wide horizontal and vertical stripes, with a pair of lime green stitching lines between the wide stripes. 

The backing is cute little ballerina mice that I had in my stash. 

And the binding is pieced from some of the extra scraps. 

Can I tell you a secret?  I didn't hand stitch the binding.  I say this like it's a confession because in the past I may have internally been a little bit judgy about quilts that have machine finished bindings. 

I had planned to finish it by hand, but then it sat by my chair for about a week, waiting for stitching.  During that week, I read a discussion on Flickr that got into machine finished bindings v. hand finished bindings from the perspective of longevity.  Hmmm.  Honestly, I don't enjoy hand sewing bindings, so I don't sew them very closely (about 1/4" stitches.)  That discussion got me worried about how my hand sewn bindings will hold up.  I decided that in the future I will machine finish bindings on the quilts that will be leaving my house, and hand finish bindings that will be sticking around.  I figure that I can always fix them if they start coming undone, but I don't want gift recipients to have to do the same thing.  Also, I don't want to hand sew bindings, so basically the Flickr discussion was the excuse I needed to let myself stop doing it.