first quilt

I have been thinking about making a quilt since before the holidays, but I had all these gifts that I wanted to make. Well the holidays came and went, and I was still enjoying my planning time (I have a long lead in time to projects where I read books, make plans, look at pictures, and make more plans).

Finally a few weeks ago I decided to go ahead and dive in. I wanted to learn how to do free motion quilting, specifically stippling, where you make wavy lines that end up resembling kind of a brain pattern. I had attempted this a couple of times on some scrap pieces, with pretty terrible results. I decided the best way to go was just to go ahead and make a small quilt.

I decided on a baby quilt for PZ and carefully selected an appropriate, but not particularly attractive fabric bundle that I already had. Some of it I kind of liked, it has the texture of vintage sheets, but some of the prints I absolutely hated. I figured it would matter less when I completely ruined the project during the quilting phase. Despite the throw-away nature of the project, I still thought I should practice a little piecing. I combined the fabric bundle with some remnant linen that I had a couple fat quarters for the back.

Here's the front

For the back I used those fat quarters, plus practiced some freestyle piecing on the back with the scraps.

The quilting, by the way, is horrible by any technical measure. There is a lot of improvement though from the time you start the piece to the time you finish. I still have a little less that 1/4 of the blanket left to quilt. Then on to the binding and done!!!