Tea towel progress report

I finally decided to add a white border to the outside of my tea towel quilt. It is plain but my plan is to mirror the half circles from the inner border using quilting. I did a lot of calculations to figure out how wide to make it based on the potential size of the half circle motif. And, after all that I realized that I only had enough fabric to cut a 3 inch border.

While away this weekend, I found some wool thread by Madeira. I've never used this before and I thought it might be interesting to use for the hand quilting on the center tea towel panel - the colors were perfect.

I also thought I'd try to use a polyester batting - I hear that my usual thin cotton batting can be hard to hand sew through. I bought some that was prepackaged because for some reason all of the batting in the store was wrapped up in plastic and I could not feel any of them. I thought I picked a thinner one, but once I pulled it out it seemed very dense. So far, not so good. My next mistake was using a basting spray - also something I never do. After spraying half the can onto the quilt, it did not stick at all. What a waste! So, back to old school pinning.

Now that it's finally basted, I'm not sure how to attack. I think I should machine quilt the inner border first to keep everything in place. I also don't seem to have a hoop or a thimble to do the hand quilting (I think I packed them away). I confess that this is not the first time I've planned to hand quilt, but I have never succeeded. I guess I'm just looking for excuses...

Linking up with Lee @ Freshly Pieced.