#3... and 4 & 5???

After having so much fun quilting again (Baby J's Gig 'Em Quilt)... and after Katelyn carried Baby J's quilt around all day while I was trying to quilt it (she REALLY liked that quilt, hee hee), I decided to make Katelyn a quilt she could actually keep for herself - my third quilt of the year!  Look at these yummy fabrics - don't they just scream PRETTY LITTLE GIRL???  Most of these I had left over from previous projects, so I spent little to no money on her quilt.  That said, this was the project of never-ending messes...

• Katelyn kept stealing my squares and I would find them scattered on the floor in random spots around the house.
• Then I almost ran out of fabric with no border or binding.  When I trimmed it all up, I literally had about .5" of fabric left in both the border and binding fabrics!
• Then I ran out of thread while piecing the top... which wasn't such a big deal because I thought it would be nice to have slightly different shades of thread for the piecing and quilting.
•  But then I ran out of thread in the middle of quilting, too - and thanks to Coats changing their spools I had no way of matching the threads.

So... she has 3 different colors of thread on her quilt, but unless you're looking closely, you'll never be able to tell!

Here is the top, finally pieced, and "basted" to the quilt back and batting.  Katelyn thoroughly enjoyed toting this around as it was - guess I could've skipped all the quilting!

And, boy, did I quilt!  This is probably the most heavily-quilted quilt I've done thus far (in my very extensive experience... a whole 4 completed quilt & one partially hand-quilted twin-size quilt).  I gave background quilting a shot surrounding the raw-edge appliqued squares on top of the blocks (the two smaller squares on each block).  I quilted what looked like continuous diagonal lines emanating from the center of the quilt.  In reality, I had to start & stop the lines each time they hit a piece of applique.  Not an easy feat.  Luckily, thanks to this site, I learned a new technique for machine quilting that greatly cut down not only on the chaos of lose strings while the quilting was in-progress... but also on the finishing work that needed to be done after the fact!

I recently heard about a way of including a signature patch to the backside of the quilt - cut it into a triangle shape and set it into the corner of your quilt.  The binding holds the two raw edges in place and then you sew the top edge in place when you hand-stitch the binding closed.  I have wanted to try this technique and thought this would be a good practice run, so I whipped up this little hand embroidered label one night while we watched movies.

And... presenting... the final product:

As you can see... Katelyn LOVES her new quilt! I brought it with me when I got her out of bed this morning - when she saw it, her face lit up and she smiled a huge smile! Just the reaction I was hoping for!

And now... a hint #4 & #5 quilts of 2010!