Blue Star Quilt

Yesterday I finished the queen sized quilt for Dan and me.

Most of the blue fabric is actually from our wedding reception.  We used them as square accent table clothes on top of the white table clothes.  My mom gave me all the fabric afterward, and now it is a quilt.

When I first started the quilt, I realized that I didn't have enough of the blue backing fabric, and when I tried to buy some more, they didn't have the right color.  And I didn't want to buy all new backing, since I was trying to be thrifty, so I mixed the two fabrics and made large stripes on the back.  Dan and Emily both like the back.  When I was half done with the quilting, and the sewn lines were only going one way, I laid it out, and Emily played on it for awhile.  She said it was a bridge over water.

There were a number of things that went wrong during the last few days of working on the quilt, including:

1. I had to use put the layers together twice, because I didn't check beforehand that the back of the quilt was big enough. (It wasn't.)  This meant the second time, the batting was all sticky from the basting spray I had used the first time.  And I don't think basting spray works as well the second time, plus I was trying not to use too much because the bottle was running out.

2. When I took some off the top to make the sides wider, I made it too short the other way.  Which I didn't realized until after I started quilting it.  Which meant I had to add strips to the top and bottom when it was partly quilted.  Later I wondered why I didn't just go look to see if I had some extra fabric that matched (which I did, but I ended up using for the binding).

3. My sewing machine no longer makes bobbins.  It decided to quit making bobbins halfway through quilting.  Luckily my mother-in-law has an old machine that doesn't sew well, but does make bobbins.  But it took me about a day to find this out.  Plus she went out of town before she could show me how to use it.  But I figured it out.

The worst part about the first two problems was that I had just seen somewhere that it was important to allow a couple extra inches on each side of your back, in case the fabric shifts.  Which mine did.  And then I had to fix it.  And I should have just made sure I had those extra inches in the first place.

But now the quilt is all done, which is wonderful.  We slept under it last night.  It isn't heavy, but it is warm enough, and I didn't get hot or cold.  I think that means it is a good quilt.