Crafty Shelly: My 2nd Quilting Project

This quilt was made for our niece Jessica for her wedding present. Again, I gave myself about a month to finish it, again a mistake... I always say that if there's not a deadline attached, I'm not interested! It's a queen size quilt that doesn't go over the pillows.

This quilt has been done by a few of the women in my quilting class and they told me it should only take about 2 weeks. Of course that was THEM! I had trouble with my machine and didn't actually know there was a problem, I just thought sewing was supposed to be hard. My quilt teacher pushed me aside one day and attempted to find out why my points weren't matching up. After a few frustrating minutes, and a few unmentionable words, she highly suggested I take it in for service, there was definately something wrong. She also said she was surprised that ANY of my points actually matched up on Michelles quilt, they were basically "flukes".

So I took it back to where I got it and when it was finished with its going over, I was told that the feed dogs were out of adjustment and it wasn't a wonder that I was having so many problems. The two pieces of material were not being pulled through the needle at the same time because the feed dog wasn't up high enough to help pull it through properly, especially when it came to the seams. I can't tell you how relieved I was to hear that it wasn't just me!

(THIS LINE IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE A LINE BREAK BUT ITS NOT COOPERATING!) This was also my first time trying a walking foot on my machine. At first it was horrible because I couldn't see where the stitches were going, and I decided to just use my regular foot, even after the teacher strongly suggested I not. The star part worked out ok, but when it came to quilting the borders I discovered exactly why the teacher wanted me to use the walking foot. It was kinda funny how the penny dropped at that point and everything seemed to work from there.

I was pretty pleased with how it turned out.

Front

You can't really see them in the pictures, but in the four corners there are quilted stars. I also stitched around all of the individual pieces within the star with blue thread.

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