Quilt 2 Progress

So I spent some time today sewing. It was so much fun! I made a few mistakes in my cutting, but fortunately I was able to save them.

Mistake 1: Instead of cutting 24 of my red half square triangles into a 2 inch wide piece, I cut all 48. I didn't realize I would need the other 24 half square triangles to finish the wheel center. Luckily, I had just enough red fabric left to recover!

Mistake 2: I cut the black tire pieces too far apart on the black fabric, plus I cut my binding at 2 1/2 inches instead of 2 1/4 inches, so I ran out of black solid!! Fortunately, I had a black with grey circles print that looked good, and I had just enough to do the last 2 tires, so I was able to save myself again.

You can kind of see the grey circles in this one....
And here are the black solid tires. The instructions called for paper-backed fusible web, but never said anything about how you were supposed to use it. So, I decided that I would use 4 strips on the edge of each tire center to hold it onto the black wheel itself. The directions said to stitch the centers onto the tire with a small zig-zag stitch in a matching color. Since my new sewing machine has a circular sewing attachment, I was really excited to use this. Oh how well it worked! It was fabulous!
This is the progress I made today. Except for the black side sashing, the quilt center is complete! Yay! Now I just have to finish the sashing and then attach the three borders, and I'll be done.
This is a close up of the completed wheels. You can't really tell, but they are zig-zag stitched onto the blue background. It was really quick and easy with my machine.

I'm hoping to finish it within the next few days. Then I just have to buy backing fabric. A few people have suggested solid red, but I'm leaning more towards solid black, and then quilting it in a bright red so it will show up on the back, and be reversible without losing the design. I have a lot of ideas for how to quilt this, so hopefully it all works out!