my first completed quilt

I am so proud. It is the tiniest little thing. A doll quilt, basically. But it is mine! And it is completed. And I kind of love it.

This is my favorite block:

This is the back, a single wonky star:

I followed the wonky star tutorial I found on The Silly Boodilly, which Film in the Fridge also links to, and it was very simple and fun. My husband liked it a lot and asked for a quilt made up completely of stars, but my five-year-old did not care for the wonky stars at all and went so far as to instruct me to make everything even on his quilt - which is still in the design stage - and not crooked, like on this one.

It was very much a learning process, and making a bunch of completely different blocks taught me a little more about construction than I would have learned from my simple square quilt.

There are tons of glaring mistakes:

In my eagerness, I neglected to cut all those little threads and now when I hold the quilt up to the light, I can see little blue threads through the white fabric. Not pretty.

Also, I thought it would be easier to square everything as I stitched (??) or after the fact, only to realize that maybe such approximate cutting wasn't such a good idea.

I definitely need to work on my quilt sandwich basting skills as well. When it came time to quilt some areas, I had little pouches of fabric with nowhere to go. Whoops!

Lastly, my sewing machine isn't the greatest and I often have to rethread. There is a little area in the piecework where the seam is already loose. And I haven't even washed it yet...

But I enjoyed the process so much that I went out for some sashing fabric for my abandoned nine square quilt - I couldn't wait for my fabric to arrive from the US!

It is very exciting the way everything comes together, one bit at a time, from putting the pieces together, assembling the layers and then quilting. I had a lot of fun trying out different quilting lines and patterns and I loved stitching on the binding at the end.

I think I might be hooked.