"Pawprints" Bound!

Now this is a RED quilt! I swear, it glows in the dark, tee hee. I am very proud of this one because I chose my own design work for the first time. It is a simple 2 1/2" four-patch that has been placed into a nine-patch setting block, using 4 1/2" scrappy reds.
I am also proud that the binding is DONE before Labor Day! It only came back from my longarmer (Linda Monasky of The Bear Paw Gallery in Alton, NH)
http://www.thebearpawgallery.com/index.html
on August 31st, so that was three days! Linda did a beautiful job of hand-guiding the red thread into lovely swirls.

Usually I take a month to get "around to it" on the bindings. This is also the first quilt that I ever happened to make with a binding that is the same fabric as the outer border. Would that be called a "self-binding"? I have a basket of binding scraps saved and there was more than enough of them to use on this, but I just could NOT bring myself to add another layer of busy-ness to this quilt. I'm glad. It looks fine.

This border and binding fabric were a super-saturated Robert Kaufman fabric that is a great blender. It has almost every shade of red worked into it which is I think why it works so well with all those varied scrappy reds in the quilt's center. I'm also glad that I decided to use a bland neutral for the 2 1/2" inner border.
I'm often guilty of making quilts that are "too girly" So this one got a real macho flannel camouflage backing. And one of the scrappy reds that I used is a tone-on-tone of red pawprints, hence the name.

The quilt's secondary pattern of crisscrossing lights doesn't show up until you view it from a distance, but it is so fun when you finally see it!