It only took me 5 years to finish this thing... I would go in fits and bursts... get a lot of squares done and then none for a long long time. I was chatting with a friend about projects unfinished and this came back up. Turns out I really was nearly done, I was derailed a year (or two or more??) ago when I had to cut a bit more of the light blue background color... I had it, I just had to cut more strips so things came to a long halt. Anyhow, after mentioning it I decided to finish up and it took all of almost no time at all to finish the last 10 squares or so. I was sure it would take forever to sew the squares all together... but nope! They went together in an afternoon (with some sweet help).
After an attempt to randomize the colors and reshuffling a few different ways, we settled in on a rough rainbow distribution. Of course, after all that I don't sem to have a picture of the whole quilt at once. It was bound in fabric from the crib set that Auntie Gigi made for the kids. I loved it, the big cross on the back is from that as well and I love that I get reminded of it every day. The crosses are entirely from my stash and scraps from various projects, which is to say I have purchased too much fabric over the years. The pattern is from Modern Log Cabin Quilting by Susan Beal (mine is even autographed :). In all truth, though it took forever... this is NOT a hard pattern at all. the crosses go together so easily.
In the end, I took it to get quilted by a professional long-arm quilter guy.. Leon Gogl if you need someone. He did a great job and had it done in a few days! The pattern suggests tacking buttons in the middle for quilting, but I didn't love the idea of sleeping on buttons, and sort of felt they would get snagged on things (though looked cute in the pattern). This is a big quilt for me (though still a bit small on our queen sized bed), and I didn't think I could sanely cram it through my sewing machine. Anyhow, I"m glad I had Leon do my first big quilt project. I"ve made some big quilts for the kids bed, but they were large pieces put together, this is the first fiddly quilt I"ve made, with lots of cutting and seaming. It ended up pretty square in the end, and I"m proud of it!
Shoot I just realized that I need to make a tag for it. What year do I put on it though. Start/end year (too much like a headstone?), just the final year?
