TGIFF/Finish It Friday - YUMMY!

Well, I can officially say that my second "real" quilt is done!  

I'm so happy with the way it turned out!!  I love the colors, I love the pattern... I love it all!!  I finished hand-binding it in the wee hours of the morning this morning, got it washed and dried, and it's ready to go in my "Top Secret Christmas Gift" storage until December :-). 

I haven't put a label on it yet as I think I'm going to wait until I get all the gifts done for this year and do them all at once. I bought some printable fabric I'm going to use and figured it would be easier just to print a whole sheet of them and do them all at the same time!

Here are the details on the quilt:

• Started: June 9, 2014    Finished: July 4, 2014
• Pattern: Jolly Jelly Roll by Christa Quilts
• Approx Size: 49" x 49"
• Fabrics: Ansonia Pink & Chocolate jelly roll, Kona brown and pink yardage (can't remember their names)
• Thread: Sweet Pink from Connecting Threads
• Batting: Warm & Natural

As always, still being a newbie to quilting, I have a lot to learn.  Some of the things I learned on this one are:

• The importance of squaring up your blocks before attempting to sew them together. I don't think my strips were 4 1/2" tall, so when I cut the strips into 4 1/2" squares.... They were more rectangle than square which made sewing them together rather difficult. 
• Need to perfect matching of seams. I pressed the seams on the strips open like the pattern states, but I continued to do so on the squares which made it difficult to match the seams since they wouldn't "nest"
• Just how much fabric shrinks!  This one appeared to be rather large before washing.  It's supposed to be 51" x 51", but I lost 2" on the height and width on this one during washing.
• The bigger the quilt, the longer it takes to hand-bind. Lol. This one took me three nights to hand-bind and my poor fingers are SORE!!

Now that I can check this one off my list, it's time to start a new project. I think before I tackle another big quilt, I'm going to whip up the table runner for my coffee table. It'll be a nice little break from the mega-sewing that is a big quilt. With this weekend being a 3-day weekend for us here in the states, I'm shooting for having it done by Sunday. We'll see. Lately my weekends haven't been going as planned, so I'm not getting my hopes up. 

Hope all of you who are celebrating Independence Day today have a very happy and safe holiday!!




Linking back to Finish It Friday at Crazy Mom Quilts , TGIFF with at Quokka Quilts, Can I Get a Whoop Whoop? over at Confessions of a Fabric Addict, and Link-A-Finish Friday at Richard & Tanya Quilts