Monkeys, Hexes and more!

I've finally found my sewing groove and have been madly stitching away since Sunday. First up, was a simple tote bag I slap dashed together for my daughter. By "slap-dashed" I mean I was in a hurry to do some quilting, so the bag was about a 2 hour project.



She choose the fabrics, which put to use some rather tacky prints for which I had stashed away to make my son a quilt but had ended up using Bali Pops instead. I foundation pieced roughly cut strips onto my lining fabric (flannel) and sewed a separate lining as well. I experimented with external handles for the first time, which I think turned out well as they're sturdy and can take a moderate amount of weight.

She promptly stuck a Princess button on the front and hauled it off to day camp. It coordinated perfectly with her socks!



About the time I was finishing the handles on the tote bag, my friend arrived to work on her monkey baby quilt. This is what we got done by the end of the day:



My friend is new to quilting and sewing, and she struggled with stitching an accurate 1/4" seam, even with the 1/4" seam foot on my machine and her pinning of pieces was all wonky. I found I had to suppress all of my "perfectionist" tendencies and let her work it out. How else can you learn? Fortunately, the simple block pattern is a forgiving one and I'll show her how to trim down the finished blocks to consistent sizes once we get to that point.



Aren't they cute?

Lastly, the hexagon quilt. It's been sitting around waiting for me to decide what to do with the back. I totally screwed up and not only bought insufficient fabric, but then proceeded to cut it up the wrong way. Eventually, I was able to re-piece, running a line of leftover hexes down the middle and it still was too small! Then I cut some borders out of the leftover front border print fabric. I literally had only tiny scraps left but it worked!



I pinned it together last night.





Usually, I use baste spray, but I'm still hanging onto the notion that I'm going to hand quilt with perle cotton embroidery floss. I'm waffling though, as I hadn't intended to have a pieced back and am not sure how my pattern will look going across the hexes on the back.

Any ideas/opinions on what I should do?