See you at the NEC

So I should really be in bed but here I am posting the last pictures before I go. I have my longarm gallery quilt, Winter Star, packed and ready to go tomorrow morning. These are the pictures I took of it before I trimmed and bound it. The finish size was specified and I decided that I would rather have a gap to the sides of the geese than run the risk of them being clipped by the binding depending on how it shrank as I quilted. As it turned out I could have used a slightly wider binding, but I think it was the right way to go for me. I like to make my quilts oversize them trim them to where I want them. I like the quilting to appear to continue beyond the quilt and the feel of the binding when there is quilting in it. I even do this with borders, making them a couple of inches bigger than I want before quilting. There are four shades of grey thread in this quilt and a lot of black. The binding ended up with a thin piping of shaded purple as my one colour.