My First Quilt

Last night I took a break from knitting baby hats to work on my first quilt. (Tonight is the charity knit, so I'll be back to my other projects soon.) I've been reading Quilting for Dummies, but this pattern was from a book called Quilting by Biz Storms which is actually for kids but I really like this series - I've been using the Knitting one by Judy Ann Sadler for teaching my neighbor girls, and I have the Making Fleece Crafts one which I'll be using for Christmas gifts this year. Anyway, the quilt is a very simple 3 bar pattern that makes zig-zags across the quilt and I thought it was a good pick for my first one. I had already sewn the bars together onto 8-inch squares of fabric, so last night I started out by ironing them and trimming the edges...

Yes, I know the colors are very patriotic... I didn't exactly plan it that way. The white fabric was given to me and when I went to pick out the other colors, I found a cute red fabric and thought "Ooh, a dark blue would look nice with that..." and well, there you have it. Next, I started piecing the squares together into long rows...

By then it was about 9:30pm and for a moment I thought of maybe reading a few chapters of my very engaging book before going to bed... (Oh and if you're wondering where my husband was during this entire time, he was busy playing Halo 2 on the X-Box with some friends online...) But oh no, I'd gone this far... I just couldn't stop here, so I finished the top by ironing, pinning and sewing the rows together...

And here it is! You're only seeing half of it since it's draped over a couple of chairs, but I'll try to take a better photo (with daylight) when I've got the backing on it. It will be a gift, although I'm not yet saying who it's for because I'm hoping it will be a surprise!