Owen's quilt.

I finished my second quilt.  It was a gift for my nephew Owen, the boys' first cousin on their dad's side.  I'll tell you a little bit about it.

I found a fabric bundle on fabricworm.com that I really liked, a group of 12 fat quarters.  Owen has a little jungle theme going on in his nursery, so I thought these fabrics would work well.  I used a free tutorial on Two Little Banshees that called for 6 fat quarters, so I set aside half the fabric for another project.

The pattern was a super simple one, using only squares and rectangles.  It didn't take long to put the top together.  I decided to add some hand-embroidery for a little extra interest.  I stitched Owen's name, and outlined a few of the characters on the fabric.  I stitched my name on the back, too.

When I was ready to put it together, I kept the quilting really simple too.  All straight lines, some horizontal and some vertical.    I finished the binding by hand, and that was it.  I hope Owen will use it a lot.

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A few weeks after this quilt was finished, I took a free motion quilting class at a local quilt shop.  Free motion quilting means you can quilt in all kind of fancy lines, swirls, circles, leaves, whatever.  Instead of straight lines.  Lots of exciting possibilities.  The class was fun, but my machine didn't seem to love free motion.  I spent too much of my class time wrestling with my machine.  I need to keep practicing.  And I have a ton of questions that didn't get answered by the class.  I have a friend who is rather an expert in free motion quilting, but she is a busy mom, midwife, and blogger, so I can't bug her, unfortunately.  Just tell me this, Christina... have you ever heard of someone binding their quilts BEFORE they quilt them?  Our teacher said this is how she has always done it.  My mind was blown. 

Lots of embroidery projects queued up currently, but soon there will be more quilts, I hope, and some free motion experimentation.