Another post.....so soon???

I think the best motivation for me to post is when I have something to post!!!! Now that I'm off of school I've been feeling very crafty (as you could probably tell from the last post).

I have a good friend who is having a baby soon and I wanted to make her a baby quilt. I went to the store and picked out the fabric (actually Moose picked out the fabric - strangely enough he has a great eye for fabric) and when I got home and pieced it together, I realized that I had enough to make 2 crib-sized quilts. I was really excited about this because my stake is doing "Project Linus". They have challenged every woman and young woman in the stake to make a blanket (any kind of blanket) to donate to a foundation that gives the blankets to really sick kids. The extra blanket that I'm making will not only go to Project Linus, but it will serve as my practice for the one I'm making for my friend. YEAH!!
Although I have done lots of sewing in my day, there were a few things that I did on this blanket that I've never done before, so I was a little bit nervous. The first was the binding. I've made a few other blankets, but my super-crafty mom has always done the binding for me because I was so intimidated by it. Sadly, I live way to far from my mom to get her to do the binding for me, so I was on my own. While the corners aren't perfect, I think they turned out pretty good.
The next thing was actually quilting it. I have always wanted to machine quilt instead of just tying the quilt. My new sewing machine has a free-motion quilting function that I tried out. It was really fun, but I learned a few lessons. The first is that it takes a lot of patience. The second is that I need to draw the pattern before I start. Randomly creating a pattern was fun, but doesn't look quite as professional as it could. Here's the finished product for Project Linus. I'll let you know how the quilt for Courtney looks when I finish it.

This is the back

This is the front.

I know that you can't really see the machine quilting, but that's probably better since it's not perfect. When I do Courtney's I'll take a close-up of the quilting.