I’m finished!  Woohoo!

The quilt-sandwich making took over an hour {followed these instructions} which I did while the little guy was napping.  I’m glad I splurged on the bent-quilting pins – made pinning the layers easy.  Quick work.

Then on to the quilting.

Oh, my.

I haven‘t had much success with free motion quilting.  But I was one determined girl.  So I checked out a few tutorials.  The best advice I read, however, was a comment in a flickr thread telling me “machine goes fast, hands go slow.”  Reading that was like the key that unlocked the door.  That and increasing the tension to a 6 or 7 (from a 3-4).

It is physically taxing to move that much fabric around, balancing the weight of it all and trying to keep it moving under the quick up/down/up/down of the needle.   Took a lot of breaks.  Untangled the kid from under the table.  All in all the quilting piece took a good 3-4 hours.

Binding went relatively quickly.  I like using small, geometric print on the bindings.  Adds interest I think (not that this quilt really needed it).  I used the machine with a walking foot to attach the binding to the back of the quilt, then hand tacked it to the front.  By this time, I was sick of sitting in front of my sewing machine.  So I did the final hand sewing on the couch watching the rest of Dinner with Schmucks.

Finished size is approx 50″ x 54″.  Nice lap sized.  Pattern can be found here.  Along with a wealth of quilt-making instruction. 

Lessons Learned:

• bent-quilting pins are my friends
• do the on-the-floor work during naptime
• machine fast! hands slow!
• tension = high (6-8) for free motion quilting