I did it

I finished my step-son's quilt. In 7 days. I'm not sure I really want to do that again.

I apologize for the crappy indoor photos but you just can't take a quilt outside in our weather & I have to give it to him in 2 days. Not likely I'll have a good photo op between now & then.

As I mentioned, the design is simple patchwork - 5" finished squares.

The quilting is also simple, just going diagonally through each square, which was brave especially using black thread on a quilt that includes yellow squares:

I think I did really well except right along the edge where I didn't account for the seam allowance of the binding:

But overall, I'm very happy.

I found some great flannel for the back at Joann's. I had no idea what I was going to use and stumbled on this great squared musical note pattern at 60% off!

And then I found the binding at Walmart, of all places. I was driving & calling all over town looking for a Lalaloopsy Silly Hair doll for my daughter. I have since decided it would make a better birthday present anyway:) But the Walmart across town from me still sells fabric and some of it is surprisingly good quality. I saw some Cranston Prints there and recognized several prints from Joanns. I didn't want to bind in solid black since the backing is actually an off-black, and any Kona gray I could find seemed to clash with the crackle gray on the front. I think I about squealed when I saw this black, red & gray stripe, and in fact had to chase someone down to cut it for me.

Despite my huge rush to complete, I'm very happy with how this one turned out.

It's a great lap-size at 65" x 70". The rock and roll prints were from Timeless Treasures and were absolutely wonderful! Very soft and very nice to work with. The solids are Kona, the other prints are not designer - just picked up at various places. The batting is Warm & Natural.

What I learned:

The first being to account for the binding seam allowance when cross hatching.

And the second was that using a design program is a better way for me to lay out the pieces. I don't have a design wall, and when I've just used my floor, I've still never been able to keep track of what I was supposed to sew to what. For this one, I made squares in my desktop publishing software to represent the different fabrics & just designed the layout on my computer. Then I moved the squares around to tell me what to sew to what until I had finished rows. If you noticed in the second picture, I did still have a couple of instances where the same color was sewn to itself - obviously not my intention. I did get confused somehow on that next to last row, but overall this went much more smoothly for me and I will use this method again.