The Nightmare Quilt

This quilt.. Spring time last year, I decided I would try to make my first quilt. Rachel had been making so many beautiful quilts and had inspired me to give it a go. So off to Hancock Fabrics we went in search of a good quilt book with some patterns so that if  I really like quilting I would have some other patterns to choose from in the future. When we got to the store I saw this book and the quilt on the cover totally won me over! Rachel then helped me pick out literally 20+ different fabrics to go with this quilt and off we went! When I got home I was just so excited! The patterns in the book are absolutely incredible and I even contemplated doing a different one (its on my to do list now) but ultimately I decided I would start the quilt I had intended the fabric to be for! When I purchased this fabric I was pregnant with Scarlett and had an inkling or maybe it was just my wish that she would in fact be a girl so I went with some really girly fabric! I figured if I have a girl, sweet I will have a quilt for her if I don't then I will just have a pretty pink quilt all to myself! I started cutting out all the fabric within a few days and it literally took me an entire week!! I have done lots of quilts since this one and I have come to the conclusion that the time it took had little to do with my lack of experience and more to do with the intensity of the quilt pattern that I had choose! I then began to sew and sew and sew. It became clear that the 1300+ 2 inch pieces that I had to sew were going to take some time. Since it was my first quilt I didn't really know any of the tricks to make it go faster and was making it a lot harder on myself. For any of you quilters out there who are reading this I made 700 flying geese with out chain stitching a single one...Yes I had no idea what I was doing!!!! But alas I finished them! it took me many months just to get that part done and by that time I was burned out and I decided to make several other quilts along the way! I have made a total of 5 other quilts and started 3 more. To say I was trying to avoid this project would be an understatement. Somewhere along the way I realized that I could not keep this quilt I knew that this was Rachel's quilt and I hoped that I would be able to finish it and give it to her for her birthday! I like to name my quilts so that when me and Rachel discuss quilty things (which happens daily) she knows what I am referring to and vice versa. This unintentionally became known as the Nightmare Quilt. I began to loath this quilt, I cut pieces wrong, I sewed hundreds of little pieces together entirely incorrect and spent a couple months just ripping them out it was a complete and utter disaster I even considered burning it on more than one occasion! New Years eve rolled around I had planned to have family and friends over for a party and that ended up getting canceled and I decided that I would finish that dang quilt! I rang in the new year on my machine with a 2 liter bottle of Coke and finished basically the entire quilt top in one night (I had figured out chain piecing at this point) and I have never been more proud of a project. It is definitely not perfect and If I had it to do over again I could have saved my self a lot of trouble. However this dang thing taught me how to quilt it was the best learning experience for quilting I could only have learned from this experience. When I spent the last two weeks free motion quilting this and crocheting the edges I was absolutely beside my self with excitement that Rachel had no idea I was even working on it let alone preparing it for her birthday This in itself was a hard secret to keep but I'm glad I was able to do it! It is also the VERY first quilt I have ever free motion quilted like everything with this project it probably was not the brightest idea to officially FMQ my first project that is larger than a standard queen size quilt but I'm nuts and I did it any way. It is as perfectly imperfect as I could  have hoped for and Rachel is the only person who could appreciate the work that went into this quilt. I also figured it was high time she had some quilts of her own since all her quilts are given away as beautiful gifts. So with out further a do HERE IT IS!

I finished the edges with two different crochet stitches the scallop stitch and the bobble stitch also known as the raspberry stitch. I mentioned the bobble stitch in a pin it Friday post and when I said I had just taught my self how to do it this is what I had been practicing on;)

(note my bed is a King if that gives you any idea how big it is)