First Time Quilter

There are some things in life I'd never thought I'd do. Quilting was definitely one of them. But, hey, look!

I'm really proud of how it turned out - but there are certainly things that I would do differently the next time around. One thing I was really surprised about was the overall weight of the quilt when handling it through my sewing machine. I mean, I picked a smaller lap quilt size because I knew a larger quilt would be awkward to manage, but even with it being small there was some weight to it. It took effort to get it through the machine - even with a walking foot attached - and that resulted in some tighter stitches happening in places where I was pushing it through rather than letting the walking foot do the work.

Another thing I realized - after the fact, unfortunately - was tension issues after changing the bobbin for a new one. This only happened once, thankfully, but it still annoys me to no end to see the tangled small stitches on the back of the quilt for one section of stitching. But perhaps this is something that only the creator/author will see.

I also realized that I probably should have practiced sewing the widths for quilting before actually setting the quilt up in my machine. As you can probably see from the photo above, wonky lines abound -- and some general changes in width somewhere near the middle! Yeah, that doesn't look great. I used an attachment for my walking foot that allows for equal measurement for spacing, but that can get screwed up pretty quickly if the line you're working off of isn't straight to begin with. For the next one, I'd probably measure out or even draw the lines on to the quilt itself to save myself some wonky-line-related frustration.

To end it off on a positive note - I was pleasantly surprised at how relatively quick the hand-sewing of the binding went. Seriously - this was the part I was dreading the most. But I just plonked myself in front of the TV for the equivalent of about 2.5 hockey games and just sewed to my heart's content.

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