First Gift Quilt - Finished!

Made mostly from 'Paula Prass Flights of Fancy' fabric I purchased on etsy, this one took me from Fri-Monday to finish last weekend. The thing I really like about quilting as opposed to other projects is that I can pick up and set it down easily. I'm not inclined to set down projects. I prefer to just barrel through and finish but with a baby around, there are distractions galore and they cannot wait.

One time, however, I was so determined to finish a part of one quilt (the blue-green one) that I figured out how to nurse and rip seems at the same time while sitting at my machine bench. It was awkward and uncomfortable but I got both jobs got done. And this week I managed to nurse BFN while sitting on the floor of her room working at my laptop while taking a phone call. Babies are the reason women were forced to become excellent multitaskers.

Although baby and I still prefer to NAK (--> cute Nursing @ Keyboard onesies designed by my SIL), I'm finding that I'm becoming much more at ease with not NAKing. And most of the time BFN moves from NAKing to SNAKing, it's a relief. She falls alseep in my lap and then I can, maybe just maybe, move her still sleeping, still nestled in the quilts I've bunched around her to support her, to another place so I can get up ..... and get back to quilting, or take a shower, or make lunch for myself, etc. I've got a gallery of saved pics of her lying on her bedroom rug in all different arrangments of her cozy quilt coccoons. They're amusing. I'll have to make a gallery of them sometime. So, this particular quilt — in its nearly finished form at the left — is my first quilt that is a gift. I used the free motion foot to embroider a message on it along one edge and 'wrote' the year too. That was fun. It turned out much better than I expected. Have you ever tried to write while moving the paper instead of the pen? Hard! Try it with a sewing machine.

Learned a couple things with this one too. My seams met much more closely and I had almost no need to rip out seams because of bunching. I have changed my technique for prepping the layer for top quilting. If I start the free motion stitching in the middle of the quilt and re-stretch and re-pin as I move out toward the edges, I've found everything stays much more taut. The other thing I'm doing now is using safety pins to keep the layer together. They don't fall out and get lost as I move the quilt around.

My best quilt so far, I think!