Baby quilt

I started this quilt back in November of 2008 for a baby that was due February 23, 2009. That was plenty of time to finish it before she was born.

This quilt was started during a quilting retreat weekend with some of my best friends in the world. We all went shopping for fabrics and supplies, then we holed up in a hotel suite and had a blast cutting, sewing, talking, eating lots of junkfood, and drinking bad hotel coffee.

During our initial quilting shopping trip, I bought the pattern book for the pattern I used for this quilt. It is "New Cuts for New Quilts" by Karla Alexander and there are a few patterns in there I'm looking forward to making in the future.

Although this quilt is technically finished and sent (the baby had been born a couple months before I sent it), I am thinking the quilt needed more quilting. All I did for quilting on it was stitching in the ditch along the columns and a criss-crossing wavy line on the thick border areas.



After I had sent it off, I found out the sewing machine I recently got for Christmas from my boyfriend can do free-motion quilting! I'm practicing and getting better at it, but it's still not a walk in the park for me. Either the quilt is too heavy, or there isn't enough space on this machine, or for whatever reason(s), I can't do it consistently well. I can't move the quilt around under the needle with any kind of finesse so doing a free-motion pattern on my sewing machine seems to be completely out of the question. I suppose all I need to do is practice more. Practice and work out my arm muscles so I can push and pull 10 pounds of blanket around like it's nothing.