8 Years in the Making

I have finally completed a project that I started eight years ago. When my brother and his wife announced that they would be having a baby boy, I wanted to embark on my first quilt. I made one quilt then decided I wanted to make a second one (Don't worry, the first one just barely got the binding put on but it's not as exciting). At the time, I was obsessed with cross-stitching. I have this book called 101 Bears with Personality and I had run out of reasons to make them so I used a baby as an excuse to make a bunch! I spent hours cross-stitching all of the bears and then did my best to piece them all together and that was the end of it. I didn't know much about quilting at the time and didn't know how I wanted to quilt it. I knew I didn't want to tie it because I didn't want all of the yarn to take away from the bears so I just gave up. It sat in my closet for years, just staring at me and waiting to be finished. I took a home decor class last spring and learned how to free-motion quilt so I figured I would try that...but the semester ended and I still never finished. Then I thought I would just stitch in the ditch with my own machine since I couldn't free motion it. I safety-pinned together all of the layers and then never did anything with it of course. Then I planned to free motion it when I started school again in January. Never happened. Well as my final semester began I knew it was now or never. Thankfully I was working in the sewing lab as an aid and had plenty of time with the machines. One Saturday I had to work the entire day and I free-motioned the whole thing that day! That's about 10 hours of time it took to quilt the whole thing! It was a miracle. It took me until a couple weeks ago to finally finish hand-stitching the binding on, but it is finally completed. I never have to worry about this darn quilt again! Obviously, Ethan is now about to be baptized so I will just have to keep it for my own someday!

 (I fully intended to crop my awkward self out but I forgot and I'm too lazy to re-upload)

You have no idea how happy I am to have this finished. So many hours of work have finally come to a close.