First Quilt

Last year my mom and I decided to be brave and take a quilting class.  We live across the street from a quilt shop so it was convenient and we both really wanted to learn.  The quilt shop is called B&B Quilting & Gifts and they are some of the nicest people around.  They know so much about quilting and they are great teachers.  It was so convenient to live across the street, too.  I'm sure they got tired of us because we were always walking over there with questions.  But they were very nice and helped us out anytime we needed  them.

I took a lot of pictures of this project throughout the process because it was my first quilt and one of the biggest craft projects I had ever tried.  It is far from perfect but I'm pretty proud of it.  The quilt top is done but I still need to have it quilted.  I took a machine quilting class to see if I could quilt it myself but I don't think I'm quite ready for that.  :-) 

The name of this quilt is Scrapaholics.  It has a lot of squares!!

First we had to pick out fabric.  I think it was something like 8 light and 9 dark fat quarters of fabric.  Some of both groups had to be mediums. Very confusing!  It took me forever to pick my fabric!!  I would probably still be picking fabric if it weren't for the awesome help of the ladies at B&B.  They really know how to pick fabrics that will look good together.

We had to cut the fabric into about a million strips and sew stip pairs and make half square triangles.  Thangles are one of the greatest inventions of all time!  They make it so easy to make half square triangles.  I still have no idea how to do it without them...and I don't really care. 

I think it was something like 96 half square triangles.  It took forever!!!

Next we assembled the individual blocks.  The rows were Dark/Dark/half square triangle, dark/medium/light, half square triangle/light/light so it looked like a dark triangle and a light triangle together.

(We used the back of a table cloth for our design wall)

Once we got all of the blocks assembled it was time to decide on a pattern for the quilt.  This was my favorite part!  It was like a giant puzzle trying to place the blocks in the pattern I chose and not having the same fabric touch (I didn't succeed completely but I did okay).  I think my mom said this was her least favorite part.  :-)

After that we sewed rows together until we got the quilt top finished.

  (You can see the stickers where I labeled each block's placement on the quilt in this picture.) 

Then it was time to sew the border onto the quilt top.  I decided to try mitered corners on my first quilt (Why?  I don't know!).  I was a little confused by it and then I didn't work on putting the border on for a while after I finished the blocks so a friend showed me an easy (kind of cheating) way to do it and I finally got it done!

Now I just have to get it quilted and sew the binding on and it will finally be done!  I hope I remember how to do the binding when I finally get to it.  ;-)