First Finished Quilt

After I finished my quilt top, I needed to get a walking foot before I could do the quilting step.

That ended up taking about a week, so my quilt spent a lot of time sitting like this in the living room:

After I got a walking foot from Joann's, I had some trouble getting started with quilting.  After a few false starts, I ended up having Steve do a bit of maintenance on my machine.  He took it apart, oiled the spots recommended in the manual and replaced the bobbin winder.  This helped immensely and made quilting much easier.

I drew lines on the quilt top to use as guides.

The back of the quilt.

After quilting came the last step, binding.  I pinned and sewed the binding to the back of the quilt.  The corners are a bit funny looking at this step, but that's so they look nice on the front.

Then the binding gets folded over to the front and pinned before sewing it in place.

The front corners ended up looking pretty good, but in the future I think I'll sew the binding on by hand instead of using the sewing machine.  Having the stitches hidden on the binding would have looked a lot better I think, even though it probably would have taken more time.  I spent more than my fair share of time with the seam ripper while I was working on the binding because the first time I sewed it on the bobbin tension was way too low and it was all scraggly on the back.  I contemplated leaving it a bit scraggly, but I decided that after all the time and effort I had put into it already it was worth the extra time to do the binding right.

The last step is to send it through the washer and dryer.  It helped soften the quilt up as it was quite stiff before washing.  I had to get Shout Color Catchers to go in the wash with it, and I'm really glad that I did because the color catcher cloth came out of the washer a dingy gray, and I did not want that extra dye absorbing into my quilt.

My finished quilt.  It's a bit smaller than our queen size bed and great as a lap blanket!

All of my quilting advice came from the excellent quilting series on Diary of a Quilter.