I finally finished the quilt I made for my sister, who has been battling cancer and, after chemo and surgery, is doing well.  I decided to make her a quilt last summer when she was in the hospital.  I had previously seen the tiger panel, purchased one in August, 2019, and then started designing the quilt. 

My previous quilting experience was mostly large lap quilts with minimal piecing.  I have since learned that these are considered “whole cloth quilts”.  Very easy.  However, seeing all the beautiful pieced quilts people were making, a few years ago, I started branching out.  I made a couple of twin size quilts, which I designed myself using graph paper.  Embroidered designs and did free motion quilting.  Those turned out really cute.  Then a couple of years ago, I made a queen size quilt.  I embroidered designs in some of the blocks, did some quilting in the hoop around the embroidered designs, and free motion quilted the rest of it, using my Pfaff Sensation Pro II.

On my sister’s queen sized quilt, since I’m a newbie, I wanted to try the star and the flying geese blocks.  I also wanted to incorporate more animals into the quilt besides the tiger panel.  So I drew out some rough designs and started finding fabrics.  I really started working on the blocks the first part of November (just about wore out a couple of my Fons and Porter Love of Quilting magazines).  In January I figured out the design for the animal print borders, then in February started back at it.  Planned on doing the free motion quilting on my Pfaff Sensation Pro II, but in December, a friend of mine bought a long arm machine and offered me the use of her machine, which I took her up on in April.

Her husband helped me get the digitized quilting onto the flying geese and star blocks, (he’s becoming a whiz on that thing), and I free motioned all the rest of the quilt on their long arm.  What a blast!! 

I took it home and put it on a huge table in my garage to cut off the excess batting and fabric and pinned up the binding (while my boyfriend worked on his motorcycle!).  This quilt only took me about seven months to do, (November to May) not counting the time to get my fabrics all together.  Way longer than I expected, but I didn’t work on it 24/7 either!

As a beginning quilter, none of my quilts are perfect, but I’m getting better with each one and having fun in the process!