My First "Finished" Quilt

After lots of sewing, and lots of sewing mistakes and seam ripping (using an instrument to undo your sewing work), I am done with the front part of my first quilt.  The last step was to apply a sash that unites the quilt blocks together.  After joining the blocks I did not align them to the lowest common denominator and looking back this made it very difficult to pin the sections together.  Here is a picture of the quilt almost done:

I am not sure if you can tell in the last one not sewn how all the
blocks edges are a bit different.
This is what I did not align and should have.

After finishing, and then redoing a couple of seams to make sure that fabric that had lines going down (they are in the corners) had those lines straight, I took an iron to the whole quilt and this is the final look:

Top of my first quilt

Since I will be in Palm Springs over the weekend, the teacher is giving me a makeup class on Tuesday to show me how to (i) add the cotton batting (cotton that goes in between the front and the back of the quilt), (ii) add the back of the quilt, (iii) bind it all together and (iv) machine quilt it at the end.  I am a bit nervous about the machine quilting since I dont really like all the flowery stuff that people do with the sewing machine after the quilt is done.  I prefer straight lines.  Straight lines are easier to do so hopefully I can tackle that.  Most people send their quilts in to someone that has a long arm quilt machine for the last step.  Here is a picture of one:

Long Arm Quilt Machine.
I cant even imagine how much
one of these things costs.

I will update after the class but more than anything I am excited to start my new quilt.  I have learned a lot from my first quilt (and class).  I would never have chosen this quilt or design but am glad to have one under my belt.  Now for the next quilt I am doing a pinwheel quilt and am using a combination of the following fabrics for the pinwheels (mixed in with a white fabric for each pinwheel):

Boho Moda Fabric

Happy Go Lucky Moda Fabric

I will probably use the Boho Moda Fabric mostly since it seems to have more primary colors and take the blue from Happy Go Lucky since it might give it a good color contrast.  I will use only fabrics with tiny designs for the pinwheels as the amount of fabric seen in each quarter pinwheel is not very big.

Hope you enjoy my blog.  Next time I may include some of my crochet work that I have been working on and include the throw I crochet for our living room a couple of months ago.

Thanks for visiting and please feel free to leave me comments.