Quilt Progress....a sneaky peak

Tomorrow marks the official end of summertime....boo! This reminds me of the picture I took at the start of the month of my hanging quilt peices which I hung on my curtain rail. It's sad to think these were the last few sunrays of the summer!



...the quilt is now fully pieced together, and quilted but I still havnt found a suitable backing fabric. Here's my problem:

My daughter loves the minky dot I used for my sons blanket, but I'm not sure if I could bind it due to the bulk of it.(Anyone know?/tried it?/seen it?) I've thought about self binding it with the minky but I think I'd prefer a seperate binding is I prefer the finish, but Im concerned as I have a stripy binding and think it might look too busy with all the textures and prints.

If anyone has any thoughts on using a seperate binding with minky dot, id love to hear them. I do wonder if a plain cotton backing would be longer lasting as both minky and fleece (which I previously considered) tend to look tired after a few washes.

So far I have had only one hitch. I pin basted this time, which I found a lot more succesful, but the drawback in doing this was a tear I found, and ofcourse I only found it once it had already been partially quilted!!!I have no idea how this happened, I can only think one of the quilting pins must have got caught on something, as it looks like a rip. Here is the offending square:



As you can probably see from the state of it, I tried to zig zag across it to fix it, but there is just no way I would have been happy with leaving it that way so I had to take the plunge and replace the square...not a very easy task but it would have kept looking at me and bugging me if I'd left it, so it had to go.

I'm aiming for this quilt to be ready by the time my daughter begins school on the 13th September so i still have a couple of weeks to mull this over.

Its been a wonderful month with the children. I wont lie, it was made A LOT easier because my husband took three weeks off every couple of weeks. I have really got back into going to the gym and as a result have lost half a stone which I'm really pleased about as I gained it just before Christmas and have found it quite difficult to shift. (now all I need to do is loose another half stone in preperation for this Christmas so Ill be back to normal for the new year!)

Right, im off to catch up on the 900+ posts I have missed out on during this month!
xx