Only just large enough

I measured the quilt when I had made the final trim, ready to bind - it was exactly 24" tall (if you use one of my rulers, its about 1/8" short with the other but we won't tell the judge). The rules of the challenge state that each edge must be between 24" and 36" and that it must use a recognisable amount of the challenge fabric. The tree leaves/flowers are cut from the challenge fabric.

The sky was partly quilted and then unpicked, completely quilted and unpicked again. So this is the third quilting for some of the sky. The grass under the tree was quilted and then quilted again over the top - so that is quilted twice. The faces have been quilted and unpicked too many times to count and I'm still not happy with them but I don't really know what to do about it now. Closer quilting helped as did using a smaller needle - it took me three lots of unpicking on the faces to realise that the stitches looked wrong because they were dark and that was because even though I was using a pale thread I was using a large needle which was leaving dark holes.

Apart from the quilting (which I am finally very happy with except for the faces), the biggest success was the small dark blue interior border. I made that by folding a piece of 1cm wide blue ribbon in half and sewing it down with a double thread and wide zig zag stitches. It made a big difference to the overall design. I'm also pretty happy with the silver nutmeg and the golden pear.