quilting zee

for the past three fridays, i've been getting together with friends melanie linder, sara smedley, and karen stanford. though none of us ever made a quilt before (i started two, but never finished either...), we wanted to tackle the project to make one for jen, in celebration of her new baby hayden. we came together with vague ideas and notions of how quilting is done and what kind of process we needed to go through to put it together. i think we were all seriously impressed with ourselves and the outcome of our first quilting project:


it all came together rather easily. -- the first time we met up, we brought pieces of fabric from our various collections and found that, when we put them all together, they just worked! we barely had to do any editing. we decided on our size and pattern and got started on cutting the squares. each of us took one square to embellish with printing or embroidery. the next time, we started putting the quilt top together and i think we were all pleasantly shocked that it went so smoothly - literally - everything just lined up! i guess it was a good thing that we were so precise with our measurements. then, this last friday of our project, we finished the quilt top, made little tied knots between all of the squares to keep it quilted, and put the three layers (top, batting, and back) together with bias tape. i'd say it was rather painless! careful measuring, precise cutting, straight, steady sewing, tidy ironing and attention to detail at the seams and corners totally paid off. we actually got it done in time to go deliver it together to jen and new baby hayden. hooray!