Back to Work on the Landscape Quilt

Well I got all set to write this post and then remembered that I'm not supposed to post pictures of this quilt.  :(  It makes it hard because I wanted to ask for advice on lots of topics!!

Today I finally had time to drive to quilt shop to buy border fabrics for my Denali landscape quilt.   Picking fabric for the border was incredibly difficult because I couldn't decide what color I wanted to highlight.  I am not used to quilts like this one where there is no defined color scheme.  I tried out a dark purple, dark teal, tan, reds, and every color in between.  After getting advice and suggestions from two different people in the shop, I ended up with two colors that I am pretty happy with: a lovely pale teal and a burnt red.

Border fabrics

The teal is for a thin inner border, and the red for the main outer border.

Inner border attached!

Now I scratched my head for a while trying to figure out how the heck to attach the border pieces due to the uneven mountain portion at the top of the wallhanging.  Finally I decided that it would just be easiest to sew the whole thing down to one giant piece of red fabric.

This is definitely not the world's greatest sewing technique, but it did the job.  I basically created a giant reverse applique of the wallhanging onto the border, because after I sewed it down I cut out the back so that all the lovely red border fabric wouldn't go to waste.

Backside of the wallhanging, reverse appliqued onto the border fabric

Next step was to put that arch along the top.  I printed out a big arch from my computer that was sized to the dimensions of the quilt.

Printed arch-very high tech :)

At this point the top is ready for sandwiching.  I am debating how thick I want the border to be.  Right now it is pretty big and gives the image a sort of distant feeling, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

border all cut out with the arch in place!

I am planning on getting this done in time to enter in my local guild's quilt show in September.  But, I do need advice if anyone has it: how do I hang a quilt with a curved top? To enter it in the show it has to have a hanging sleeve.  As of right now if I just hold it by the two upper corner the top flops over.  If it's stiffer once quilted, I might be able to get away with a normal horizontal hanging sleeve and the top bit can hold itself up.  But I'm not quite sure...

Tomorrow I will start quilting this thing! I am very excited about entering this next stage :)