The Purple-y Quilt

I finished sewing the label on this bad boy two nights ago. Yesterday, I took a few quick photos before bundling it into a box and getting it ready for mailing.

Since we pulled names for Christmas gifts this year, I was charged with picking out a gift for my husband's grandma. I was looking to get something customized with all of the grandkids and great-grandkids names on it or something, and then my husband had the great idea to do that, but with a quilt! So I made a signature quilt. My mother-in-law had the great idea to add some sort of quote or saying, so we added a portion of Proverbs 31 to some of the blocks.

This was my first big project attempting FMQ. I had read on Leah Day's site that taking a quilt and doing one huge design on it will ensure you've improved your skills by the end, and that is mostly true. It would've been more true in my case if my machine hadn't gone in for service halfway through the quilting. They adjusted the timing, so when I got it back, it was totally different! I initially tried a stipple on the blocks, but it looked terrible, so I spent three hours ripping out stippled lines and went with a loopy curly thing on the patchwork instead. The hardest part was getting an even distribution of the loops from block to block.

I did okay. Some areas are definitely nicer than others, but I did learn some things about FMQ. (I also picked up some quilting gloves, which helped a lot!) I'm glad to have this one finished, and in 2012 to boot! It's a great way to finish off the year.