A quirky quilt for May STUD

I've been saving this post until my partner, A Piece of Me (aka Sandi), received the quilt. I got an email from her today that she received it! She mentioned that she laughed out loud when she opened it, which I take to be a great sign since it is rather silly.


The theme was Alphabet Mania and I got the letter "Q" and needed to incorporate that in any way I wanted into the mini quilt (15" square). I made a "Quartet of Quizzically Quacking Quails".. it's a bit of a quirky quilt, but I'm really happy with it. It's the first quilt that I finished on my own from start to finish. Not only was it my first complete quilt, but also
-first appliques
-first free motion quilting
-first binding
-first label





I have been loving Anita at Bloomin' Workshop and Kajsa at Skyo's sketchy stitching and decided the I would try my hand at it with the quails. I bought a charm pack (5" squares) of Moda's Wonderland line and followed Anita's great tutorial. I had never tried to free-motion quilt before and I was nervous at first to lower the feed dogs. What's great about the sketchy stitching is that it's not supposed to be smooth or perfect. Here were the test quails, before I did the ones that ended up on the quiltie.



I'm really proud of the corners on the binding! I used Oh, Fransson's tutorial from her quilt along, and ladder stitched the back. It went perfectly!


Don't look too close at the back... those quacks left all kind of knots and whatnot on the back since I did it with the machine. I probably should've done it by hand, but you live and learn, right?


Here's the label. I don't enjoy hand sewing that much, so I actually just ironed this one on. I'm having second thoughts about it now... but it's in the mail, so there's nothing I can do. Next time, I'll tack down the edges too.


And if you want to see more pictures, click on any of the photos in this post to get rerouted to flickr where I have more posted.