Formal Garden Quilt Finished At Last!

 So here is the Formal Garden Quilt.  I only quilted the actual squares, leaving all the linear parts kind of puffy from the batting.  Each square is 7 1/2 inches with the 2 1/2 inch divider in brown.  The quilt is 7 squares wide and 8 squares long -- I think the finished measurement turned out to be something like 71 inches by 85 inches.  Sounds a little random.  I think my measuring skills need some work.

This thing took me three weeks of sewing time from beginning to end -- about 30-35 hours.  I always get just a little tired at the end of a project.  Enough that I have to be careful not to rush through the final finishing steps.  But really, this quilt turned out so nice that I'm really proud of it.

I put a lot of time and attention into getting the corners matched up as well as I could.  They're far from perfect, but certainly quite good.

 The backing is a tan paisley print 108" wide cotton from JoAnn's, and I bound the edges of the quilt by cutting the backing extra large and just folding the edges to the right side and topstitching.  Hmmm. Shoulda took a picture of that.  Oh, well.

Here's a close up of the quilting.  Right from the start I want to say that I have never done free motion quilting before.  I didn't even know my machine could drop its feed dogs.  So this is beginner's work, but for a beginner, I have no gripes.  Getting that whole giant blanket quilted like this seems to me a great accomplishment.  I'm looking forward to doing it again.  I even bought some variegated quilting thread to try.

So all in all, my first couple of experiences with "real" quilting have been fabulous.  I'm planning a new quilt as we speak.  I think I mentioned it before.  It's called Raven in the Window.