Finished Quilt

Hooray! I finished my first quilt today! I worked hard the last couple of days to finish this off and it is sort of a bitter sweet achievement. Sweet because it's cool that I made a quilt, but bitter because it's done and now I have to wait until I get paid (not till the end of February!) to start a new project. Anyway, these are the things I had to do to finish the quilt since my last post. The first thing I had to do was finish drawing all the quilting lines -- that took a very long time and unfortunately, by the time I was done sewing the quilting lines in one direction, the lines in the other direction were extremely faint and hard to follow. I think they got rubbed off from being handled so much. I didn't redraw them, but lesson learned -- I'll remember that for the next quilt. The machine quilting took about a day total. I worked on it some yesterday and finished it today. I can see why most people don't do this with a regular machine. It wasn't that hard, but it was tedious and for a quilt this big, it was hard to keep all the lines straight. However, overall I think the lines turned out fairly straight and evenly spaced. There are a few spots that are wide, crooked or bunched, but for a first quilt, I was pleased and would machine quilt again. Once all the machine quilting was finished, I trimmed the leftover batting and backing on the edges. Then I pinned and sewed on the bias tape. This is what I ended up with:

I really like how it turned out! I'd like to give it a wash to break it in a little bit, but am too afraid. I don't want to shrink it or anything. And I didn't pre-wash any of the fabrics because most of it was scrap pieces and the navy and backing were such big pieces of fabric I didn't want to deal with trying to iron them once they came out of the dryer. I may regret that I didn't pre-wash the fabric, but I'm sure I'll find out eventually.

I realized you haven't seen the backing yet. I couldn't get enough of the navy pindot fabric that is on the front, so I went with a different navy fabric that was in the same collection. It's called marbles -- kinda crazy, but I think it makes it fun. This is what it looks like:

Well, there it is. My first quilt. I'm definitely happy with it! It even looks good on the back of the couch :)

Quilt Progress

I made a lot of progress on my quilt today -- and it shockingly looks a lot like I planned! I started sewing around 7:30 this morning and began by sewing the navy strips and the patchwork strips together to make the first and third panels (as seen above). I then sewed the 3 panels together with a navy piece between each of the the panels. After that, I sewed on the border. It took quite a long time to get this all together -- I think I was finished with it around 3 pm. Once the top was finished, I measured, cut and sewed the backing pieces together. That was the simplest thing I've done all day. Then I made my quilt sandwich with the backing, batting and quilt top as you can see below. I've got it all pinned together and am working on drawing the quilting lines. I think I made a mistake by choosing to quilt it. Drawing these lines is taking forever and it's going to take a long time to sew all of them, too! Oh well, hopefully it will be worth it in the end. I'm going to keep drawing lines tonight and then tomorrow hopefully I can sew the sandwich together and put the binding on. The end is near!

Patchwork Strips

I got the fabric for the last 18 patchwork strips, so I spent a couple of hours yesterday afternoon and a handful of hours this morning cutting and sewing and finished them off. Now I just have to wait for the rest of the fabric to come in order to finish the quilt off.

The First Quilt Vision

I haven't gotten all the fabric I need to finish the quilt, so today I made the bias tape (binding) that will go around the edges and worked up my vision of what the final quilt will look like. For the binding I cut a bunch of the leftover scrap pieces into 2 1/4" wide strips of various lengths, sewed them together, ironed the seams, pulled the fabric through my handy-dandy bias tape maker tool (thanks, Becky!) and ironed. I now have about 300 inches of bias, which should be plenty to go around the edge of the final quilt.

Here is a photo I mocked up in Photoshop of what I imagine the end product will look like. The horizonal blue strips will all be the same width (3 inches) even though the photo makes it look otherwise, and the vertical and border blue strips will be 5 inches wide. The binding is 1/2 inch wide. So the final dimensions of the quilt will be somewhere around 60 x 80. It's a little on the wild side, but it's sort of neat, I think. What do you think?

First Quilt

I spent a good chunk of today putting the beginnings of this quilt together. Mom bought me a couple of bags full of scraps from The Quilted Forest in Forest City so I thought with a new table and a bunch of fabric I should make something. I started by randomly piecing the squares and rectangles together. This was made easy by the rotary cutter, mat and rulers I got for Christmas. These tools made cutting all the pieces really simple and fast. After I made 5 patchwork strips, I realized there was no way I was going to have enough fabric to make the whole quilt out of patchwork strips. Luckily, there happened to be some strips of fabric that were about the same length as the patchwork strips, so I put them between the patchwork strips to make it longer. There are now 17 strips, each 3 inches wide, making it 51 inches long. It's only about 21 inches wide, so I'm going to use whatever backing fabric I buy to make a border on the sides to make it wider. So far I think it is turning out nicely and now I just have to find some backing and decide if I'm going to use batting or flannel between the top and bottom. Flannel would be easier because then I could just tie it, but we'll see. I've got the next two weeks off from work so I should be able to finish this soon!

New Work Space

For Christmas, Mike got me a new table to sew at! It is really nice and spacious. I am definitely glad to have more working room and was able to get a lot done today and not feel crowded. The table I was using before was very small and really just big enough for my sewing machine. This was an awesome Christmas present and I'm glad Mike thought of it! It is going to get a lot of use. Thanks Mike!