Border, Sign, and Block The Red LIon

With all that curvy curvy mane stuff going on the the center area... I needed to use something more visually stabilizing  on the quilt BORDER.   Since the fillet in red is a 1/4 inch... I decided to use a quarter inch echoed squares  motif around the whole border (top,bottom,left,right sides). It's not absolutely necessary to use a quilting foot to do this.... Instead, I put my regular 1/4" pressure foot on,  significantly lightened up the pressure foot tension, engaged the feed dogs, and tested straight stitch on my practice quilt sandwich ( I always  use one on something important.. same batting top,bottom fabrics too... i.e. a real comparison). This straight stitch squares quilting wasn't hard to do and as you will hopefully think ... looks nice.

SIGNING  is one of my favorite things.... not because it's my name... but it means I am done quilting and can move to the finishing steps. Quilts of all types are art and I think are justified carrying the name of the maker.  I normally am using chalk or equivalent marking top and bottom parallel lines to guide my name quilting but in this case, I chose to sign my name on the border fabric already equipped with 1/4" parallel lines of stitching.  In writing/signing...go slow. I use an average weight thread ( eg. 40wt).  If the signature is not as prominent as you want... once you've written your name forward, you can slowly backtrack to the start of the first letter.  I didn't do that here...   not desired/needed.  I do like my signature on my quilts but I don't like it to distract from the central image.

Now to BLOCK. I have placed this quilt on my big board... evenly dampened the border fabric which has a bit of service distortion from all the pushing and pulling of the central image quilting process.  I pressed the outer border areas with an iron, to get them flat but not yet dry. The outer edges of this image is where I have pinned through the quilt and into the big board.. holding the shape into place while I let it air dry overnight

Binding and sleeve are now needed...

BTW... About blocking... it can and may be done more than once.  Once a piece has been folded / traveled etc to a show and returns home, it can be a bit out of wack and could be reblocked.