My first quilt

I finally finished it up a couple weeks ago. Oh, I love it so much! I've been holding off posting about it until I got some decent pictures, but I still haven't brought it outside for proper photos, so these will have to do.

I pieced a log cabin/pinwheel strip in the backing so it would be reversible and I love that side too! No pictures of that yet.

I swear I didn't pose her like that, she likes to sleep with her hands tucked under her cheek like a little angel. It's the only time she tries to impersonate one, so I have to document it for proof.

Overall, quilting was a whole lot easier than I anticipated. Honestly, the hardest part was just sitting down with a calculator, ruler and graph paper to figure out the dimensions and factor in seam allowances, etc. And the cutting process was tedious. After that, it came together very quickly. I spray basted, which left and interesting film on my kitchen floor, but was quick and easy. Free motion quilting the stippling (is that want it's called? I feel like a fraud using quilting terminology, I'm such a newbie!) was challenging, but I felt like I hit a groove about halfway through. Handling a generously sized twin quilt on my small machine wasn't nearly as hard as I thought it would be.

Details:

The fabric is "hunky dory" by Chez Moi and the sashing and cornerstones are Kona cotton. I purchased them all from fabric.com, but the Hunky Dory is not available anymore - I believe you can still get select prints here and there if you are a savvy internet searcher.

I shamelessly stole the pattern from this gorgeous baby quilt. Like I mentioned before, I just sat down with a ruler and graph paper and figured out how large I wanted it to be and went for it.

The squares are 7" finished and the sashing and cornerstones are 2". I used a 1/4" seam allowance on everything. I started with a 2 layer cakes and just picked my favorite prints and trimmed them down to 7 1/2" squares. The scraps were used for the pieced backing strip.

I used cheapo machine quilting thread and it worked fine. I used "Warm & Natural" 100% cotton batting. It's pretty thin, but the quilt has a beautiful drape and it was much more manageable on my machine than I imagine a thicker poly batting would have been.

Here are some links that I found particularly helpful when working through the nuts and bolts of quilting:

Basting: Distant Pickles

Free-motion Quilting: Oh Fransson!

Binding: Jaybird Quilts

Thanks for letting me show off my very first quilt! It's the biggest project I've ever started (and completed!) and so I'm just a *little* proud of it. ;) My next quilting project(s) will be my "if it's a boy" quilt and my "if it's a girl" quilt. 11 weeks and counting until baby #2 makes his or her debut!

Molly

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