The quilt is complete!

I am so excited to show you all the final product.

To finish the quilt I did straight line quilting on most of the quilt. I had never done free motion quilting before so I was a bit nervous to try it. I did however give it a go in the blue section with circles and then I attempted to spell out a name in the squares on the far right side.

Here you can see the lines I drew for myself to quilt. All the lines are based 1" apart. I used chalk to mark my quilting lines and it turns out that was a mistake. I put the quilt in the washing machine as soon as it was complete. Which was within two hour of me applying the lines. However, my thread in several places remains stained and the fabric in a couple places also. I don't know the best solution. Possible a friction pen or another fancy pen.

The binding job was the most even I have done to date. Here is a picture of the back. You can see one section where the binding had a mistake, but the corners turned out perfect.

Another lesson learned, my making a quilt sandwich technique sucked. I was trying to use my dinning room table with blue painters tape. I didn't realize until I was mostly done that the tape did not stick to my fabric. So my back wasn't 

 as straight as I would have liked it to be. I am going to have to find a different place to sandwich my quilts. The table just doesn't work with my current set of tools.

Total time for completion of this project was about three days. Approximately 10 hours. Definitely something I could get faster at if I needed to. It was fun and my baby boy will have a new quilt when he's born.

Ready to finish the back

I am not a patient person. Finally the fabric arrived for me to complete the quilt back. So excited to get sewing.

The Back Beginning

I had thought that the fat quarter bundle I had would work for the back as well. Unfortunately I underestimated by about one yard.

So, fortunately I found a yard more of the same line Mixed Bag by Moda on Fabric.com and its on its way here. 

My plan for the back was just piece it. I took some scraps, sewed them together, squared them up and then added another piece. 

Here you can see I chained pieced these similar sized scraps together.

Then I did the same with some larger scraps.

After squareing them up I fit pieces together I. A way that I thought they would fit together. I didn't really pay attention to the pattern on the fabric. I focused mostly on the size.

Here you can see me squareing up the edges. 

I'm learning as I go here, so this photo isn't very good at showing what I am doing. But, I have one long piece of fabric and a shorter piece. I guessed at about how much fabric of the other piece I neede to add to make hem roughly even. I had some 2" strips that I sewed together to make a little block to fill in the space.

It was after this last piecing that I ran out of fabric. Now I have to wait for the additional fabric to arrive so I can finish.

Quilt top complete.

I am not posting step by step pictures on this because I was in a groove and my phone was charging. But let me tell you lessons learned here.

1) My prints are directional. I did this at first by pulling a random strip or square and attaching it to the grey sashing. Well, what I didn't realize is I needed to pay attention to which direction the fabric was going relative to the strip. I ended up having to re-do all the squares except one to get them going in the same direction as the bigger pieces.

2) my prints are directional. So, for the strip running vertically I knew I was going to have to piece something together to fill that space since I only had fat quarters. I wasn't thinking about the directionality of the print when I pieced the blue square in  the middle. When I held it up I noticed the top of strip the triangles point to the right and to the left on the bottom. I don't know how I thought it should look, but I thought with the different directions it looked good and kept it.

3) I modified my design from the original pattern. I made my large color 6.5" strips 21" long. This was 1.5" longer than the pattern I was loosely basing my design on. What I didn't realize was this would mean I would have to piece my sashing. So, if you look closely you'll see seams I. The sashing. I would have preferred no seams in it.

4) I didn't keep the sashing exactly the same. The whole time I was thinking to do the last strip of grey across the top would be easy. I didn't realize that it wouldn't match the bottom. I created this quilt in columns with grey sashing across the bottom of each strip. I should have attached a strip to the top of the row after I got it all together. Then, the top would match the bottom. I don't think it distracts from the overall look of the quilt doing it the way I did it. But I do think that I would be more pleasing had I done it the other way.

My next step is going to be piecing the back. This will be a challenge because I don't want to have to buy more fabric. Plus I need enough left over for my binding. Because I messed up on cutting so many fat quarters I essentially lost 1.5" linearly across about 3/4 of a yard of fabric. 

I will post detailed pictures of my piecing process for the back because I searched high and low for a tutorial on how to do what I want to and saw nothing.

Starting a quilt

Well, as my first post I thought it would be appropriate to start a new quilt. I am not an experienced quilter at all. So as I start this new quilt for my new baby you'll be able to learn with me.

I am making a quilt inspired by this.

Today I pressed my fabric  (Moda Studio M, Mixed Bag. I purchased fat quarters from eBay)

Then, I started figuring out which fabrics I was going to use for the front of my quilt. 

Unfortunately, I messed up cutting three of them. One, I cut to 6" instead of 6.5" wide. Then in an effort to knock the last two out at the same time I accidentally cut the 6.5" in the wrong direction across my fat quarters.

Eventually I got all my pieces cut. Tomorrow I will hopefully cut the sashing and piece the top.