Finished Bento Box Quilt - Feels Good!

Isn't it just a great feeling to be all the way finished with a quilt?  This quilt has been such a huge undertaking that getting to the finish line has been a little strange.
I actually finished last night, and today I didn't know what to do with myself!  I may or may not have watched several episodes of Gilmore Girls (I won't tell you how many I watched in a row - but it was somewhere between 3 and 5).
Finally I trooped outside with this gigantic (and HEAVY) quilt.  It hasn't been very sunny today - but as soon as I realized the weather was getting WORSE, I decided it's now or never.

So here is my finished Bento Box Quilt.  For a minute there I thought it had gotten a lot smaller after quilting.  Then I put it on my bed for perspective.  Nope.  Still huge.  93" x 106".

I went with an overall meandering quilt pattern - because it's fast, it's easy, and very forgiving.

There are still tons of puckers.  Here is my worst one.  I figure it won't look so bad after we wash it... :)

I decided to just fold the back over to the front to create binding - once again, it's fast, easy, and somewhat forgiving.  I'm not sure I like it though.  I don't really like the white - it makes the whole thing look a little unfinished.  And because of the back, we get the scrappy look on the sides.  I hope my sister likes the scrappy binding look!

And here's the back (which almost looks like a second front to me...).  It started to get pretty windy at this point.  The red thread really stands out on the white fabric.  Next time I'm not going to worry about getting cute swirly white fabric, cuz you can't see the swirls anyway, now that it is quilted.

Overall, I think everything turned out pretty well.  It looks really good if you stand back and look at the whole picture.

I still think my next quilt will NOT be a king size, though.

Quilt Stats:

Started: Julyish 2011

Finished: November 2011

Fabrics:  All from Joanns, with the exception of the scrap fabrics used for the double wedding rings

Finished Size: 93" x 106"

Recipient:  Younger sister K - for her wedding to J - December 2011

Wedding Rings Quilt Back

I am making progress on my sister's wedding quilt!  My original plan was to have a plain white back with the wedding rings and initials in the middle.  Turns out I grossly underestimated how much fabric I had.
When I went to the store, they were all out of the white swirly fabric I wanted, so I was left with a dilemma.  I knew I needed a few more yards of fabric to cover the back.  I am not very good at making these kinds of decisions, so I just bought three fat eight bundles and sewed them together.  Then I supplemented the rest of the quilt back with everything I had left over from the quilt top.  If I had been thinking clearly, I would have saved some for the binding.  Oops.  I think I might end up doing the "fold over the back and sew it to the front" binding method.  We'll see.

I took this outside, since it is so HUGE and I could never get a good picture of it inside my house.  Turns out that taking outside doesn't make it any less huge.  This is about 2/3rds of the quilt.  But you get the gist:

I have been hard at work quilting this bad baby on my home machine.  Quilting the middle has been pretty difficult, but I am managing - it just takes a bit of wrestling.  And a willingness to accept that there WILL be puckers in this quilt.  I have already discovered some pretty nasty ones on the back.  But I'm kind of on a deadline right now - gotta get this done before the babies come!  Luckily, the quilt is for my sister and I don't think she will care about a few wrinkles.  I usually quilt with rubber gloves on, but with this one, I have to take one of the gloves off so I can feel whether or not I am quilting wrinkles into the back.  Makes it a little harder to move around, but I think it's helping.
Oh yeah - and I tried spray basting for the first time!  I just bought the stuff they had at JoAnns, and it seems to be working pretty well - other than maybe it is part of the whole "wrinkle" problem.  But I think it will be worth it in the end.  I wasn't about to crawl around on the floor to put a thousand pins in a king size quilt while almost 8 months pregnant!

My goal is to finish this by the end of the week!  And then the babies can come.  Wish me luck!

Double Wedding Rings!

So, when I first asked my sister what kind of quilt she wanted for her wedding, she showed some interest in the double wedding ring quilt pattern.  I decided not to attempt a whole wedding ring quilt - it just seemed too far out of my league.  But I did try making two rings and I am going to stick them on the back of her quilt.  I think they turned out alright.  I could maybe do more of these someday, but I definitely could use a lot of practice.  Here are some of my thoughts (for my own personal future reference) on double wedding rings:

-I used Kaelin's Quilt-along.  Love her blog, by the way.  Just a couple of things I came across that worked better for me:  I wish I had cut AROUND the arc templates, sewn my pieces on, and then cut the arcs on the line once I had sewn the fabric.  It seemed easier to cut through fabric when it was attached to paper, plus it could have saved a lot of time in cutting out the templates.  It was also easier for me to pin my arcs to the melons by starting in the center and moving out, rather than pinning the edges and then filling in the blanks.  But that was just me.  Other than those two things, Kaelin's instructions were TOTALLY AWESOME.
-This pattern requires a lot of hand cutting.  It really didn't take me too long, but it could have been a LOT of work to do a whole quilt.
-There was also quite a bit of sorting through fabric and cutting scraps into the right sizes.  A little bit of work, but a GREAT use of scraps!  That's part of the reason I think I might actually attempt this again.
-Piecing the arcs was my favorite part.  Sewing the arcs onto the melons?  Not so much.  I never really got the hang of it (as you can probably tell from the puffiness).  I think part of the reason the melons were so hard was because of my cheap white fabric, though.
-If I had known better, I probably would have just skipped the melons and white centers and just appliqued the whole thing onto my background fabric.  I had to applique it onto the background fabric anyway and I could have saved some effort and some fabric.
-My sewing machine is really picky when it comes to applique.  I should spend some time figuring out why I can't get a good satin stitch.

SO.  It was fun to make this little sample.  It would be a TON of work to make more blocks, but maybe someday I will try and brave it.