Quilting Milestone! I am so excited....

This weekend I finished two quilts. These are very special quilts. I have made lots of very small quilts, mostly made to frame embroidery or cross stitch. I've finished two larger quilts both to hang on the wall. But this weekend I finished two quilts, both of which are for snuggling under on the sofa and neither of which have any embroidery . And both are machine quilted by me! It's really important for me to learn how to quilt my own quilts. I'm never going to be able to afford to send my quilts out to be long-arm quilted, so if I can't do it myself, I might as well stop buying fabric right now - this is why I am so excited! (And this is how I justified my new sewing machine)!

First off is the animal quilt. This is a small quilt for a little boy called Aidan. It's six pre-printed panels with complementary fabric. Not rocket science. But it is the first quilt I have machine quilted on my new machine. To keep it simple I quilted round the printed lines on the panels.

Then the real achievement: 12 pieced sampler blocks from a Countdown to Christmas Jelly Roll. Sashing. Corner posts. Border. Pieced back that I love as much as the front. MACHINE QUILTED!!! Bound. I am snuggling up on the sofa with this quilt as I write. I cannot tell you how excited I am.

Here's the front and the back:

I wanted to do free motion quilting, but this needs a lot more practice (I've signed up for lots of practice next year with the 2012 Free Motion Quilting Challenge), so the quilting on this was wavy lines, randomly stitched acorss the width of the quilt. This was enough or me for my first attempt. Hopefully you can see the quilting from this photo. The biggest challenge was managing this amount and weight of fabric. I've learnt a lot of lessons just from this one piece. Unfortunately the photos are taken indoors - I can't wait till next weekend to photograph them outside, and I leave for work in the dark and come back from work in the dark...

And I have a cushion to match and loads of leftover fabric to make Christmas tree ornaments: check out Leanne's tutorial here.