My First Finished Quilt

While I was in the middle of putting the Hello Kitty Quilt together a friend of mine was going to get married. In her invitation she stated that she wanted handmade gifts. I took this as a challenge and decided to make her a quilt.

It was perfect - it was a wedding ring design with beautiful bright colors. I didn’t know it at the time but it was a pieced quilt. But that didn’t discourage me from making the quilt. Along with researching quilt design, I also came across Linda Franz’s Inklingo program. The program had already deconstructed the Celtic Solstice design and allowed users to print the shapes onto fabric.

My friend decided to have a Celtic ceremony. I had never heard of a Celtic ceremony but her invitation also included a description of how the ceremony was going to be performed. I did research to see if there were Celtic theme quilt designs and came across Bonnie Hunter’s Celtic Solstice Quilt.

At first, I thought the idea of printing on fabric was unusual but I had never made a pieced quilt before. Printing the shapes on to fabric along with the seams lines was an ingenious idea. It saved fabric. I knew exactly how to cut the fabric and knew where to sew. All great for a beginner.

I finished the quilt piecing quickly, in under a month. Not bad for a beginner. After putting the quilt top together I realized I didn’t buy enough fabric for the backing. Luckily I had bought a lot of fabric and one of them worked with the color scheme on the quilt top.

Then I came to the quilting part. I wasn’t intimidated in the least. I decided to stitch in the ditch around each quilt block unit. On the back it created a checkerboard design.

Everything was smooth sailing until I got to the binding. I had no idea how to attach the binding and for some reason I didn’t research this part of the quilt. I didn’t look up tutorials on YouTube and thinking back now I don’t know why. I do remember being frustrated because I was trying to do the binding a couple of days before the wedding.

The binding was terrible on this quilt. I sewed the binding down like piping and had no idea how to make the two ends meet up seamlessly. I ended up sewing down the ends on top of another with the raw ends folded in. The binding ends were very visible and very bulky. With the wedding happening the next day I had no choice but to leave the binding a disaster.

The final design excluded the outer pieced border. I didn’t fancy it and didn’t know anything about quilt borders. At the time - to me - the quilt was complete without the border.

I eventually got over the binding and started to feel proud of myself for finishing the quilt. No one taught me to quilt and I only used videos on YouTube to guide me. All in all the quilt came out great - just don’t stare at the binding.