big boy quilt

Before I write about this one, thank you so much for saying hello on that last post.  I did pick a random winner and have sent an email to commenter #9 Christine M. I really appreciate all of your greetings and well-wishes.

This is a twin sized quilt I made for my son that was at least two years in the making. The finished squares are 2″ and it is 88″ x 64″ in size. Yes. That’s a whole lot of squares. More than 1400, in fact! The solid is Kona charcoal and the backing fabric is a print from Cosmo Cricket’s Early Bird line that I think will age well. The prints are a total mix — my son’s baby clothes, my husband’s overalls from when he was a baby, plus any blue and green scraps I could get my hands on.

This is my first hand-quilted quilt. My stitches are pretty big and definitely very imperfect but despite all that, I love how the hand quilting looks. It took a long time to finish the quilting but it really was nice not to have to wrangle a quilt this size through my sewing machine.  {Yep. I am still too cheap to send a quilt to a long-arm quilter and besides, so many of the “fancy” options don’t appeal to me anyway.}

I really do adore this quilt, but I feel like I’ve learned a lot about quilting since I started it and it could have been a bit better if I had known then what I know now. {Isn’t that always the case?} I love the wide variety of cute little prints that are scattered across it, but I don’t necessarily love how they “read’ from a distance. I built this quilt block by block and gave more thought to each little print, rather than to the design as a whole. But looking at it close up and on his bed gives me a great feeling of satisfaction. And my kiddo likes it too. He has requested a set of checkers so that we can play on it, which sounds like a pretty good plan to me.

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