Thoughts on the Hammock Quilt

I don't even want to think about when I picked out the jelly roll for this quilt. I'm going to say it was 2009, but it might have been 2008. I chose a pattern for it and started cutting the strips to size. Then a year passed...

via Amy Butler

I put the strips in order of color value, light to dark, so that each band of the quilt would at least have the same number of light and darker pieces. I didn't want to end up with a bunch of one value or pattern left at the end.
Putting the pieces together into long bands didn't take too long once I got started. Then I needed to press the seams, and that took some time to get around to. More months passed...
The seams were pressed, and then I needed to figure out how to arrange the long bands. I tried laying them out, but I didn't have enough room anywhere to really tell how it would look. My next strategy was to bravely sew the bands together randomly. That also went quickly, but then more pressing was required.

detail of my hammock quilt top

Originally, I had thought about using a small duvet from IKEA for the batting and an IKEA sheet for the backing. The small duvet worked, but none of the colors for the sheets worked with the fabrics. By now, the whole jelly roll fabric line was discontinued. So I took some extra strips to the fabric store to find something for the backing. I found two watery prints that worked, so I could piece them together along with some of the leftover bits of the jelly roll to tie the front and back together.

The pattern calls for making a kind of "sandwich" of the front, back, and batting. I wasn't sure about this...I thought that it might look better with binding. But I didn't want to make my own binding and none of the colors of pre-made binding worked with the jelly roll fabrics, so I went ahead with the "sandwich." Now I'm stuck at the point of top-stitching around the edges and closing the hole I used to turn the quilt.

And I need to figure out if I want to quilt it or not, and if I quilt it, what pattern? Decisions! Choices!