Linen Quilt - another UFO put to bed

My husband & I are celebrating our first wedding anniversary today.  Steve, you are my rock and I love you with all my heart.  Thank you for marrying me!

Ok, enough with the romance and on to the quilty business:

This quilt has been a flimsy for almost two and a half years.  It started with linen upholstery samples that I picked up for free.  I loved the fabrics that I started with, but to be perfectly honest, I think I made a mistake with the green sashing.  Shoulda gone with cream, for a sweet low-contrast look, but I decided that after it was already quilted.  And at that point... no.  The only direction to go was forward, so I went ahead and put on the binding.

Besides the color (which I don't love), unfortunately the green linen is also pretty scratchy.  The quilt is lap sized, so scratchy is not good, eh?  Don't be sad though, guys.  I am glad that this is finished, and even though I do wish some things were different, I still have happy feelings about it overall.  I love the quilting, which I designed to mimic that white & brown fabric in the center.

I marked this by drawing double straight lines across the quilt, then coming back along with two octangular (octagon + rectangle, ftw!  I thought that I invented that word, but then I looked it up and it's real).  Er... where was I?  Ah, I used octangular templates that I drew & cut by hand.  I placed them purely by eye and traced around.  Then I quilted with a walking foot, which took quite a long while because of all the turns I had to do.  At the middle of the quilt, it took 15 minutes to do each line (yeah I timed it) - so 30 minutes for each set of chained octangles.  The edge of the quilt was faster at about 4 minutes per line, since there was much less to work through the throat of my machine.

This quilting was sort of like a cocoon.  I went into it an impatient quilter who always looks for the end of the project, and I baked in there for a while and came out the other side as a butterfly.  Ok, so, not exactly a butterfly, but I did learn to enjoy the peaceful repetition of slowly quilting.  When I was tired or bored, I just put it down.  (Instead of swearing in my head and pushing sloppily toward the end like I usually do).   And then one day it was just done. 

The back is grey dots from the DS Quilts line for Joann's, and the binding is a pezzy print in blue.

Yeah, my cocoon didn't make me want to start hand sewing bindings again.  I still love the binding, though, so how about another shot?

Ooooooh.
Ahhhhhh.

I cut the pezzy straight relative to the pattern before I started cutting the binding, but next time I might also cut in multiples of the pattern repeat so that it doesn't migrate around the quilt.  Er... if that made any sense.  I mean I might try to make it so that an on-edge picture like the one above shows a uniform pattern.  Er... if that made any sense either.  Well, if not, just hang around and maybe someday you will see.

Anybody else been feeling the tranquil quilty vibes lately?