Blogger's Quilt Festival Fall 2010

This is my first time participating in the Blogger's Quilt Festival hosted by Amy of Amy's Creative Side.  I'm excited to have just finished this quilt for the show.  This quilt has been a labor of love and a labor of frustration and I'm so happy that it is done!

 I love this quilt because I love the fabrics.  It is the first quilt for which I went to a fabric store and picked out all the fabrics instead of using a coordinated line.  They are mostly good quality quilting fabrics but they were all in a discount store in Maine and I have no idea how old they might be.  This summer when I was visiting my parents there, I asked my mom to watch the kids while I spent quite a bit of time picking out fabrics.  At first I was overwhelmed, but then I just found a few fabrics that I loved and started looking for others to coordinate with it and ended up loving the resulting stack of fabric.

I couldn't wait to start making something with these fabrics when I got home to my sewing machine and I decided to try a zig zag quilt.  I used a quilt is nice's zig zag tutorial.  This was my first experience with half square triangles and they frustrated me a little bit.  Once I realized I needed to do a little squaring, it all started coming together a little better, although a lot slower than I wanted.  

The dog and my daughter were both trying to "help".

In the middle of the process, my 4 year old son wanted to know who the quilt was for.  I told him it might be for his 2 year old sister...the colors would look great in her room.  He didn't like that answer so much...if she was getting one, he wanted one too.  So I started trying to finish this one up and order fabrics for him.  I love that he wants me to make him a quilt, but I am definitely feeling the pressure on all the Christmas projects that I have planned and now a quilt for my son.

In a way, this festival has been just what I needed to get this quilt finished (along with the looming Christmas deadline).  I've been so frustrated the last few days knowing that I was so close to finishing it but seeing everyone else start to post their quilts.  The four year old social scene around Halloween left me very little time to work on it.  In my haste to finish though, I messed up the binding.  After putting my quilt sandwich together and trimming, there were a few rows where the batting was still a little wider than the row.  I decided I would just use a wider binding but when I sewed it on, it ended up being too narrow in the front and didn't catch the edge of the quilt top in a couple places.  Grrr!  I decided to just finish the binding and I will fix it later.

The finished size ended up being 48 x 60 and the backing is a lavender minky.  I even took my kids to the quilt shop to pick out their minky backings and they had a great time.  I quilted along the zig zags with my walking foot, about a half inch from the top of each fabric.

Anyway, I love how this quilt turned out and I will fix the binding soon.  This will be the first quilt I've made that will live in my house, so I'm glad to be able to see it on a daily basis.  Thanks for stopping by and stay tuned for my son's quilt soon!