The rain stopped and the tarmac dried out enough to quickly get a couple of photos of the 'Celtic Mystery' Super Strips with the last border added. The quilt is now 69in square, so a decent size for a small bed quilt. Part of the mystery about why the 50 strip roll didn't go quite as far as I thought it would and the centre is basically the same size as the 40 strip version was solved when I remembered I'd removed two strips from the roll before I started - both hot fuchsia pink metallics, which didn't really work for what I planned, as I wanted the overall effect to be more like some of the garnet-inlaid goldwork of the Sutton Hoo treasure - reds, blues, golds. A quilt fit for an early medieval king perhaps.
With all the rotational symmetry that goes on within the Super Strips design, these quilts don't usually have an obvious right way up, but perhaps the mid brown section of the penultimate border should go at the bottom? i.e. Fluff is lounging around at the top, helping to keep the patchwork from blowing away! She is taking her quilt care duties very seriously at the moment.
Quilting ideas - as the original inspiration for this patchwork is a coverlet at the Quilt Museum, York, so there's no quilting or wadding (batting) involved in it, I prefer my Super Strips not to have too much obvious quilting detracting from the pieced design. So I will machine quilt this, in the ditch along each seam, and also use a wavy line to quilt down the centre of each strip, in a varigated thread, perhaps yellow thru to red. The vintage 1973 Bernina Minimatic has the 3-step ultility zigzag which can be lengthened into a lovely wave, so I think I will use that. Although the same stitch is on the Bernina 153 QE, the Minimatic seems to stitch it more neatly - and it purrs!
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