I have a confession

I have finished the quilt, you know the quilt that I took about here...now I think I might be addicted the whole using the sewing machine, I am trying to decide what project to do next, maybe another quilt, or I might want to do some dresses for Gwen, I don't know. We'll see, but I don't want to lose my skills, my sewing machine skills that is.
I thought it would be a good idea to document the process of the quilt, for my future reference. So, here it goes...so unfortunately I didn't take any pictures of the part where I put the t-shirts together, but that part was super easy and super fast. The only slight problem was when I cut the t-shirts not all the shirts where exactly the same size, and they were about an inch or less off, which made them hard to attach when I had to put on the strips the quilt kit had provided.
But after that I had to lay out the backing, and figure out how to stabilize the backing so I could baste the quilt. I chose to pin the backing to the floor...now in normal instances this would have been ok, but our carpet is carpet squares, so it hurt pretty bad trying to get those pins into the carpet! I felt the need to pull out the hammer, but I survived.
Next I added the innards, the batting. Now for this quilt kit there was no directions for this, I was going off the "book", the quilt kit suggested just putting the backing down with the quilt top (facing each other) stitch around the ends and pull it out and stitch up the whole. I decided that I was going to quilt this "for real" and give it the batting.
Next I put on the quilt top on, and on to the fun part...the basting. So basically you use pins and stabilize the 3 layers together, making sure to start in the middle and not to step/lean on the quilt while you are doing the basting, which by the way is not like basting a turkey at all!

So, next came the actual quilting. Now this was the most difficult part. I think I have mentioned it before, I had huge problems with this. There are things I just don't know about apparently, the rude woman in the craft store felt the need to tell me, which actually I wouldn't have minded if she didn't use the tone. What I didn't know was that sewing machine needles can not be used forever, apparently they get old...I didn't know that, but now I do, thanks rude lady! But I was still irritated because the needle she gave me still did not work...well, she didn't give it to me, she sold it to me, so I went AGAIN and the nice lady gave me the right needle and I was able to finish the quilt. But, the problem I was having was I thought first was the tension, which I was finally able to fix, but minky material is apparently pretty difficult to sew through (FYI-minky is that really soft material they use in baby blankets) and the t-shirts have some writing that the needle just couldn't work through, so it couldn't pick up the stitches, so, I won't let you look to close! Also, apparently the batting you use dictates how far apart you should stitch the quilting. The quilt kit suggested "stitching in the ditch" or cross-hatch. I decided to do both since I needed to do that for the batting. For my quilt, stitching in the ditch means stitching right outside where you stitch the t-shirts together. I also stitched in the middle of the t-shirts. Then I cut the edges even to the top of the quilt.

Here's the back.

And last the binding! This by far took the longest. First I had to take strips of fabric, sew them together, then I had to iron the fabric strips in half, then sew it on the quilt, figure out how to finish the strips so it looked like one piece, I know I don't have pictures of this part, but it took me a while to finish the binding, a couple days to figure out how to get the strip of binding into 1piece. Then after that was done I had to flip the binding over to the back and hand sew it to the back! PAIN! But man it looks pretty...

A close up of the binding, this is the back of the quilt flipped up, so you can see the part I hand stitched.

Well, I know most of you probably didn't read any of it, just looked at the pictures, but I need this for future quilting projects, I wonder what I am going to do next!?