Well, it's been over two months since I blogged. Yes, the baby was born January 1, 2013. Asa is perfect, and my daughter, though totally worn out in the new mom experience, loves being a mom and is doing very well. Since Asa's arrival, my sewing has slowed down horribly. Now that we are getting used to him, I am trying to get back to normal, which means I sew whenever I can grab a free moment.

Currently, I am quilting a daybed cover for a lady at work. The backing is black minky and the front is a zebra rectangle framed with pink cotton. I sewed it together, then decided the pink didn't "pop" so I ripped it out and added a strip of the minky around the edges. I love it!! Here's a picture after I attached the minky binding:

This is a view from the wrong side as I was stretching out the quilt before spray basting the batting in place. I think being non-educated regarding "proper quilting techniques" allows me to work with what I got, including my brain. I was sewing alone and had no one to help stretch the quilt, so I pinned it to the bed. If you look close, you can see the ridges in the bedspread where the pins were pushed into the mattress pillow top.

Next, I spray basted the batting into place. I used a baby quilt sized batting and since the minky is polyester, I used polyester, medium loft batting.

Then, I sewed around 3 of the 4 sides and turned the quilt. I was surprised since I have never used spray basting before how well it stuck.I pinned the quilt layers together in preparation for the actual quilting process. I had 2 packages of quilting safety pins. I think there are 70 pins per package. Those covered about 1/4 of the pins. I bought 150 more, but that still wasn't enough. After a third trip to the store, purchasing another 70 pins, I came up about 3 pins short. However, The quilt was secure enough to begin stitching.Thank goodness I had purchased a walking foot several months earlier when I wasn't sure if I would ever consider quilting seriously.

Here I am stitching in the ditch with my walking foot. The quilting blogs tell me to use gardening gloves to hold onto the fabric since they have grippy things on the fingertips. I don't garden, so I tried using rubber gloves. They kinda, sorta worked.

So here I am quilting. Woo!! Hoo!! Tomorrow, I'll post what my quilt looks like with some actual quilting done over the zebra cotton. It's awesome!!