Happy, Birthday, Quilt

Happy:

::A brand-new box of 120(!) Crayola crayons, just for me.

Okay, okay, I'll share with Amy...

:: Two visits to the beach this past weekend.

:: My handsome, perfect little boy who is 10 months old today. How did that happen?

Birthday: (mine, today!)

:: My mom made me this beautiful bag for my birthday. It is made from fabric samples, and I absolutely love it. (The crayons are from her, too).

Quilt:

Finally, finally, I finished this quilt! I finished the binding and sewed on my tag last night, and sent it through the wash today. I'm so pleased. I designed it entirely myself to use a set of 16 fat quarters from Anna Maria's Good Folks collection. All I really wanted was a design that let the fairly large-scale patterns and colors shine, and to make the most use out of the expensive fabric. Honestly, at this point I don't really remember what my math was, but I made 12 over-sized blocks made up of squares and rectangles, the rectangles being equal in size to two squares. Within each block the arrangement was totally random.

I pieced the whole top in record time; within weeks of purchasing the fabric. Then it sat... I decided on batting and fabric for the back and binding, and pin-basted, and it sat... A few months ago I started free-motion quilting it on the machine, and while I've had plenty of success free-motion quilting before, but this quilt was just too large (60"x80") and the batting too thick (supreme loft cotton), and the fabrics too pretty to be scribbled over.

So it sat...

And at last I decided to try some straight-line quilting instead, and used the walking foot on my new machine. Wonderful! So that settled it; I ripped out the squiggles and ran my stitches up and down the blocks and in the ditches, making a grid of stitches about 4" apart. In my haste there are a few areas where the top fabric got a little pushed over on itself and bunched up, but since this is a quilt for snuggling, not scrutinizing, and one featuring the fabrics, not necessarily workmanship, I think it is okay. I'm not really sure where I will use it yet; I had started with Amy's bed in mind, but she really has plenty of covers and afghans and such already, so I'm leaning toward keeping it in the living room for general use, and possibly as a starting point for some redecorating??

So that's my Happy, Birthday, Quilt update as of this very luxurious bit of free time on my birthday afternoon. Curious George will stop entertaining Amy soon, and William will be up from his nap, so I shall sign off and wish you all a very beautiful and happy spring day.