The quilt 4 years in the making!

Greetings! Today I would like to share with you the journey that I took to get to a completed quilt.

One day about 4 years ago I met a lady who loved quilting, and she was working on a beautiful quilt with butterflies on it. The moment I saw it I thought that this would be perfect for my oldest daughter (she was also my only daughter at the time). So I got the pattern, and the fabric, and cut it all out. I was sooooo excited about how beautiful this was going to look in my daughter's room. She loved butterflies, and I was planning to stamp her room with butterflies. It was going to be the most beautiful butterfly themed room that a little girl could ever have. However, after cutting for what seemed like days I realized that maybe this wouldn't be as quick as I had origonally thought. But it was all straight seams, how hard could it be right!? I mean I'd had 12 years of sewing experience for heaven's sake. Straight seams were as easy as it gets! (Let me take a moment here to add a side note. The pattern that I was working from was for a wall hanging sized quilt, I had to make 6 of these wall hanging sized panels and add some borders so as to make it big enough for a bedspread. This added tremendously to the task. The picture I had didn't seem so time consuming until I realized that I was multiplying it by 6!)

Anyway, so there I was with all my pieces cut out, I was ready to start sewing. And start I did. I got almost one whole block put together. It only took me a day to get that done. I'd be done with this thing by the end of the week! Only then life happened. I had 2 young children to take care of, and tiny quilt pieces are not child friendly. So, I stuck all the pieces safely in a shoebox along with my pattern, thread, and pieces that I'd sewn together so that I could grab it at any time that I had to sew, and work on it. Well... it sat in that shoebox for 4 years! I did pull out what I'd done from time to time to look at them, but the fact that there were over 600 pieces still needing to be sewn together was overwhelming, so it always just went back into the box. Then in October of 2007 I decided that I was not going to just pull out those pieces and look at them just to put them right back anymore. I needed to clean out my craft room, and all the materials for this quilt were taking up a lot of space! If I just got that thing done then I would clear out one more unfinished project from my craft room, and my daughter would finally have one more piece to complete her perfect room. And she wasn't getting any younger. By now she was 7! This thing was so much work that I wanted her to get as much use out of it as possible before she outgrew her butterfly infatuation! Plus it'd make a great Christmas gift. So I set to work. I sewed, and sewed, and sewed, and... well you get the idea. I think I sewed for miles to get that quilt top done. By this time I'd discovered Craftster, and as luck would have it there is a great quilting forum there. I had asked a bunch of questions about machine quilting (because let's face it, if I was going to hand quilt this thing it'd be another 4 years before that thing was finished!). And I came across a quilt frame that can be used for machine quilting on a regular old sewing machine. The only problem was that it was way out of my price range. So I talked to my wonderful husband, and he decided that he could make me something like it for quite a bit less. He's so handy that way! So several weeks later it was finished! The picture above is the quilt on the frame DH made. It was ever so handy. I had the quilting done in 2 days! Ahhhhh.... it was great to finally have this thing finished. I hope to never again take this long to complete a craft item. But I can't make any promices. I do have 5 kids after all!

Anyway, sorry the pics are all at the top. I need to learn how to format my posts better. The first one is obviously a close up of the butterflies (it's kinda hard to make out, but the butterflies are quilted with metalic thread), the 2nd one is of the quilt in DD's room, and the 3rd one is of the quilt on the frame made by DH.

Enjoy!