My Goodness, My Guinness Wall Hanging

My Goodness, My Guinness!

Finally! I have finally finished my tribute to the best beer on Earth - Guinness :)

This has been a work in progress since last year and I can't tell you how glad I am to have it complete. I wish I could say that I love how it turned out, but that's just not true. I'm proud of the fact that I pushed myself to try new techniques and to design something that relied on 'exact math', however, there are just too many flaws for me to be satisfied.

The biggest issue I have is with the quilting. The shamrock knot is good - much better than my first attempt. The pinwheel knots are atrocious (IMO). The hub says I'm being way too hard on myself. I say they could have been better. A lot better.

Close-up detail of the pinwheel quilting

Honestly, after unpicking them twice, I was just too frustrated to achieve perfection. I should have practiced more but I ran out of time (I was determined to post the tutorial before 3/17). I did spend an insane amount of hours drawing Celtic knots, but it's not the same as sewing them. My original plan was to create a Celtic knot border but after the pinwheels... Yeah, I settled for a basic geometric pattern.

My quilting also distorted the pint on the left side. It wasn't until I put it together that I noticed my pinwheels were sort of crooked too. I thought I could live with it but now I'm mad I didn't redo them. Again.

This is the original that I made last year (w/out border).
The sewing is a bit straighter but I like the background
of the new one much better. It's not as drab. 

The thing I'm most happy about is the background. The original used a solid grey fabric and I hated how drab and boring it looked. When I stumbled upon Daisy Janie's Dapple Dot print in my stash, I knew it would be perfect.

I left the back a bloody mess of threads because I only half-binded the quilt using this method from Melanie Dramatic. For a 'clean' back, you could fuse a piece of fabric the same dimensions of your quilt (trimmed). I use Pellon's Wonder Under for all my fusing needs. Then bind as you would normally.

You could also do the inside-out method. Put your quilt and your backing fabric right sides together and stitch all four sides. Carefully cut a small opening in the backing fabric then turn right side out. Fuse a piece of fabric over the slit and you're finished. With either method, you can attach a hanging sleeve too. For mine, I'm using clips so I didn't have to worry about a sleeve.

Oh, and if you aren't a fan of Guinness (shame on you!) you can always create the pint using the color of your favorite water beer ;)

You can find a link to the tutorial under the 'Tutorials' tab or go directly to the Scribd page where you can download the PDF. Please share if you decide to make one. I'd love to see it!

Slainte!