Quilt for Iris!

So, I wanted to make something for Iris that she could take home to remember us by that would be useful, yet last a long time.  The obvious answer?  A quilt :)

This was a tricky one to design because I wanted it to be fabric that I thought she would choose, but we have pretty opposite styles, and I also wanted to be excited about it and think it looked cute.  

I saw a quilt here that totally inspired me and I knew Iris would love something like this.  Once I saw that, I got to work drawing up something similar and managed to secretly work on it only when Iris was at school for about 2 weeks until the piecing was all done. And miraculously, this is how much black thread I had left:

 My neighbor has an awesome quilting machine setup and she let me use it for this quilt.  It's not a long-arm machine, but a regular sized one, that is meant for quilting, and set up on a large quilting frame.  So basically, you can quilt a whole width of your quilt and about 6-8" of space.  I decided to alternate between a row of hearts and a row of stars since I'd never done this before and I thought it would be good practice.  You can totally tell which row was my first, but I think I pretty quickly got a feel for it and it was SOOOOO much faster and better looking than trying to do it on my machine.

After finishing the binding, I wanted to take pictures.  Unfortunately...

 I guess it looks comfortable?

 So I moved it to a chair in another room, but as soon as I did that...

 So then I moved it back to another room and tried to drape it down from the kids' table.

 I did manage to get in a few shots before...

 I thought maybe folding it up and having it small wouldn't be tempting but...

 I guess it looked like a nice padded seat.

 Anyway, I'm so pleased with how it came out!  It's soo different from any other quilt I've made and it's really fun and looks like Iris to me :)

Believe it or not, before I did this, I quickly whipped out a quilt made of ONLY SCRAPS (which I'm SO proud of) to donate to my 10 year HS reunion prizes.  A fellow classmate owns a long-arm machine quilting business and she said she's quilt and bind it for me.  I wanted to wait and take pictures after it's completely finished, but here's a preview:

:)