Last minute finish

I finished my first quilt...about 20 minutes before I showed up at the surprise retirement party for my Mom where I was giving it to her. Nothing like a little time constraint for motivation. Car trips are a good time for hand binding, but not so much when you get motion sickness. Anyway, here is Derek holding up the finished product in the gas station parking lot. Classy!

Not the scenic photo shoot I was imagining to showcase the quilt. Oh well. Also forgot to take some close-ups of the finished quilt, but here is one of me working on the binding while camping.

I'm happy with the finished product (and my Mom loves it!), but definitely learned some lessons along the way. I already have plans for the next two quilts that I want to make :). 

Cowgirl Tumbler Quilt

The Cowgirl Quilt has left the building. I struggled a bit with this quilt. My original plan was to do a quilt like the one shown in the photo below. But, I just didn't like this quilt at all. I felt as though there were too many competing patterns in small blocks and the fun cowgirlness of the fabrics was lost. I also hated the solid fabrics. Baby blue and two shades of brown. They couldn't have been more boring.

I started messing around with the layout of the quilt and eventually narrowed it down to this one. First, I liked that I nixed the solids. I also combined the mirror images of two trapezoids to create a larger hexagon block to show off the kitschy cowboy printed pattern. I felt like this quilt worked.

I also pieced together chunks of batting so I didn't have to buy more. I had no idea how to do this (or if I could). I asked Google and got some pretty good ideas and then went for it. Google said to hand stitch. I would rather have just bought more than hand stitch this batting together. I instead used a wide zigzag stitch which seemed to work.  I hope the batting doesn't separated inside the quilt some day. Oh well. That is what the quilting is for, right?

I used red thread for the quilting. I quilted about 1/4" to 1/2" on each side of the zigzag seam. In addition, I stitched the horizontal ditch between each row to help the batting out a bit.

I didn't love the quilt while I was making it. I certainly liked it, but never loved it. By the end though, I did love it. I hope the new baby, Lilyanna, likes her new quilt.