My First Quilt

Here it is .... my first quilt.

Well, technically it's my third quilt, but it's the first one I'm willing to show you.. ha ha! 

I followed this tutorial to make it. It is such a great tutorial for a beginning quilter like me, and it doesn't require a lot of fabric. I was able to use a fat quarter pack I purchased at Wal-mart for about $10, as well as pink fabric for the backing and binding that I already had on hand. Since I'm new to the quilting game, I'm not ready to invest in really good quality fabric just yet.

I definitely learned some things along the way:

• I'm going to use painters tape or make markings on my quilt next time to get the horizontal and vertical quilted lines. (Yes, this was supposed to be quilted with horizontal/vertical lines, but as you can see, it didn't quite turn out that way!
• I need to practice more so that I have less starts and stops; you can definitely see jagged lines in places where I stopped and started sewing.
• I learned that I love the process of sewing and pressing the quilt top - for me, that was the fun part!

This was also great practice for my rotary cutting skills, and I'm getting much more adept at using my ruler and rotary cutter to cut my fabric.

My binding came out really good, thanks to Jera's tutorial. I am not a big fan of hand sewing, so I searched for a tutorial on machine binding and found this great one. Jera is a very talented quilter, and she has lots of great tutorials on her site. If you want to go the more traditional route of binding and then blind stitching, she has a tutorial for that too. But this method, which involves cutting your backing fabric a little wider on all sides and then bringing it around to the front for the binding, is so easy and really works good for someone like me who is new to quilting (and still trying to get mitered corners to look good).

I think I'm going to use this same pattern to make some of the baby blankets that I need to make - I currently have 4 that I need to make, so I best get busy!