The Quilt.

I started the quilt the first week of June. By the second week I had cut solid squares into strips, sewn them into patchwork blocks, sewn the patchwork and solid blocks into rows, and sewn the rows together to create the quilt top. Sometime around the third week of June I had purchased batting and decided on my back piece and sandwiched the layers together, using about 100 quilting pins to hold the whole thing together. Then I began quilting by machine, and it was a process. So much of a process that after just a couple of rows, I decided to take a short break from the quilt and work on something much less cumbersome, so I think I made a couple of dresses for Hannah Grace. 

Then I lost Dad, and that lead to quite a bit of unplanned traveling to and from middle Tennessee over the next couple of months, and then there were small projects that caught my eye that I worked on, and then from mid-October to about two weeks ago I just didn't feel like sewing. This happens from time to time, and I usually wind up focusing more on photography, which is what happened. Well, that and I put quite a bit of effort into cleaning and organizing our house. 

I finally pulled the quilt from under a pile of fabric Thanksgiving weekend, and it sat on my sewing chair for a few days before I finally decided to finish it. This consisted of finishing the actual quilting via my machine and binding, which I expected to be a nightmare. As it turned out, the quilting was my biggest frustration, and the binding was quite easy. 

But I finished it. 

And I love it: 

For the quilt top I used a layer cake by Moda in the Breakfast at Tiffany's theme. I used this tutorial to make the quilt, following each step exactly. The only thing I did differently was the material for the back of the quilt. Rather than using the snuggly fabric Moda suggested, I decided to use the flat sheet from the first set of bed sheets John and I had. The matching fitted sheet had gotten a hole in it, so the flat sheet was just folded up in our linen closet. Because it is a (real, we've learned fake ones exist) 1,000 thread count sheet, it is much softer than most of the bed sheets out there. Instead of buying or making a separate binding for the quilt, I went the (much) easier route and left about two inches of the bed sheet around the outside of the quilt, and I folded it twice, pinned all the way around, and sewed it. My mom gave me that idea; easy peasy. 

This is a great quilt for someone to make to has zero experience in quilting. Not only is it smaller than a full size quilt (this is more like an individual throw), but the directions in the above tutorial are very simple. I definitely want to make another one in the future; I just hope it doesn't take six months!