Bloggers Quilt Festival!

Hello to those of you who are taking part in the Blogger's Quilt Festival! I'm so glad you are taking the time to stop by! I'm Kellie...I haven't been quilting for very long...maybe 3 years. Three years sounds like a long time, but for me it's been three years of sporadic quilting at best.

As of late, however, I've become more and more enamored with this pastime! I've joined an online quilting bee, which I'm really enjoying and I've even joined the local quilt guild and am going to try my darnedest to complete two quilts for the club sponsored Quilt Show at our local Fine Arts Center.

The quilt I'm sharing with you is one that I've blogged about it before, but it's my best quilt to date and the one I'm most proud of so far, so I hope you don't mind a little repetition.

I made a couple months ago for a gal at work having her first child( a sweet baby girl named Zoey). I'm a sucker for a pinwheel quilt, so the choice of what quilt to make was pretty simple once I saw the tutorial at the Moda Bake Shop. This is Miss Zoey's quilt.

One thing you should know about me is that I have a tendency to be an all or nothing type of gal. If I can't do it right, why bother doing it? And for someone who isn't an experienced quilter...and I suspect for someone who is...perfection is just not possible. Being only my second attempt at machine quilting(and I haven't really pieced that many quilts, either), this quilt reminded me that I need to take that perfectionist mentality of mine and toss it out the window.

While it was not an easy thing to do, I had to go with the flow. I eventually realized there aren't quilt police who are going to come and haul me away for committing crimes against quilting. I had to simply accept the wonky seams, the weird stops and starts on the back, and the not-even-close-to-straight quilting lines and live with them.

A few random thoughts I had while making this quilt:

• Slow Down!
• "Straight", for me, is a relative term.
• I should have taken the bindings class I took two days after sewing the binding on this, before I sewed the binding on this.
• Longer stitches look better than teensy ones.
• I ♥ the walking foot.
  
• How in the blankety-blank am I supposed to stop and start a line of stitching and keep from getting knots on the back OR the thread from pulling out?
  
• Aaaargh!
  
• Why is it that I am nearly finished before I finally start to figure things out?
• I hate basting.
  
• The quilt police aren't really going to come after me. After all, the fashion police have yet to find me and I've been committing crimes against fashion for years!

In the end, those mistakes I mentioned earlier didn't amount to much. The quilt got plenty of "oohs" and "aahs" at the baby shower and more importantly, the Mom-to-be absolutely loved it. And really, that's what mattered.

Thanks so much for stopping by my little corner of the blogosphere! I hope you'll become a follower or at the very least stop by and visit again sometime. I've been taking somewhat of a vacation from blogging lately, but now that it's summertime and I have two months off work, I'm feeling the need to get those creative juices flowing again!

Now, I'm off to check out the quilty goodness that is the Bloggers Quilt Festival!