The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Quilted this beauty on my sewing machine for the very first time!!! (For details on preparing a blanket for machine quilting, go here) All the other quilts I've made in the past I've used a frame and I have either tied the quilt or hand quilted, so accomplishing this is pretty exciting for me.  I do, however, feel partially guilty calling this a quilt, because it was so easy to make.  No real piecing involved, just nice, long strips sewn together with a big fat panel in the center.  But easy is what I need right now.  Trying to get a nursery all put together on my own, while raising three small children and being over 7 months pregnant gets pretty exhausting.  I loved learning how to quilt on my machine, and I look forward to future projects.  Who needs a Longarm!?  Actually, I would really like to own one someday, but I don't know if that will ever happen (they are dang expensive).  So for now, I will stick with machine quilting.

To quilt this particular quilt, I did both freelance quilting and stitching in the ditch.  I did freelance on the center panel so that I could quilt around all the dots and big pictures, and the rest was done with straight lines (in the ditch).  I think it was a good introduction for my first undertaking on the machine.

This is the back of the quilt.  So cute right!?

For the binding, I had to blind stich the back. For those of you who are not familiar with quilting, blind stitching a quilt binding is done by hand.  Trust me, I tried to cheat.  I figured that if I used clear thread to finish it off while sewing with the machine it would barely be noticeable...Yeah, I had to unpick that mess.  I'm glad I did it the right way.  It looks much nicer, and gives me a greater sense of accomplishment.  I have a book I use to guide me through my quilting questions, but it left out some details that I needed, like how to miter corners and what the heck blind stiching is!  So I got online and looked it up myself and here is an awesome tutorial I found: click here