The final decisions were about the stitching to quilt, and the binding.

 

Quilting

The focus of this quilt has always been the Rose Window in the centre, so I didn't want to embellish with lots of stitching. However, it is necessary that the top, the wadding and backing (or reverse) are stitched together in some way to become in effect a 'quilt sandwich' and just one piece which is then bound around the edges, so it was necessary to do some sort of quilting here.

I had wondered about bringing lines out from the centre as if to radiate from a sun, but to keep things fairly simple and symmetrical, I decided to 'echo' within the sections created by the addition of the gold binding. In addition, I added some small circle designs within the centre of each of these sections.

Finally, I decided to 'quilt in the ditch' inside of the gold binding rectangles with the panels. These lines of stitching would be virtually invisible but would show up on the reverse to show some of the expected 'quilting' effect.

 

Binding

This was the final but still big decision. The obvious choice was to use some of the gold/orange fabric I'd used around the Rose Window, but this fabric is of a loose weave and I knew could be difficult to mitre in the corners.

So I'd considered using some of the red crane fabric but discarded that as too distracting. I'd looked at gold ribbon which I quite liked but couldn't get wide enough. I came back to the obvious choice of the gold/orange fabric. However, the challenge then was to make the corners as neat as possible.

In mitring corners, the binding needs to be stitched and then trimmed very close to the corner. I was concerned that in turning the binding to achieve the mitred corner, it might fray and pull through, so had to rethink this. After several different ideas, one of which was to create a 'corner pocket' similar to old photograph albums, and testing the ideas out on practice pieces, I found them too difficult to get neat, and so I finally had to revert to simply 'squaring off' each corner. In the end it was the neatest way to manage the fabric I'd chosen to use.

 

Just had to add my label (which I managed to embroider using my sewing machine) and the quilt was finished!