Garden Windows — completed!

I actually finished the Garden Windows quilt a few weeks ago, but there was a delay in uploading photos. So let's just get to it:

I followed this tutorial on the Burgundy Buttons blog. I used a layer cake of Glam Garden by Josephine Kimberling and yardage of Kona Hibiscus.

I really like the look of the purple sashing, but I wish I had gone a shade or two darker to make the prints pop a bit more.

For the back, I used the leftover layer cake pieces, placing them on point down the center:

The quilting is a little easier to see from the back. I just did straight lines down all of the sashing, extending the lines into the border. I got a few puckers, because (irony of ironies) I didn't get my walking foot until the weekend I had to have this completed. This quilt was a birthday gift for my mom, and we celebrated our birthdays in Austin the same weekend (since they're less than two weeks apart). I'll update later this week and show you some goodies I got for my birthday, and a few pictures and goodies from the Austin Quilt Show.

I need to work on my sewing/cutting posture...

(Would you believe it took me more than an hour to make that stack of trimmings?)

So for a little while now I've been annoying all my friends about how my birthday is coming up "soon." It's actually 30 days away, but it's a milestone birthday so I guess it's been on my mind. What didn't occur to me until this week, though, is that if my birthday is soon, my mom's birthday is sooner! You'd think after almost 25 years I'd have that down... Anyway, I was really struck by the design of this quilt featured (with full pattern/tutorial) on the Burgundy Buttons blog last week. I had a layer cake of Glam Garden by Josephine Kimberling (purchased, of course, from Burgundy Buttons!) and some yardage of Kona Hibiscus just waiting to be made into a quilt. Of course, my mom's hobby of choice is gardening, and her favorite color is purple. I think you know where I'm going with this...

(ninety-nine 4½" blocks!)

For the Friday Night Sew-In, I decided I'd better get cracking on my mom's birthday quilt, which I'm thinking will be called "Garden Windows." I love the way the sashing looks like windowpanes, and the bright colors in the fabric line remind me of stained glass. I was a little upset to find out that my set of forty 10" squares wasn't exactly made of 10" squares... They were a little wonky, and some edges only measured 9½"! Luckily, this pattern calls for creating a bunch of triangles, sewing them to a diagonal sashing strip, and then trimming them to 4½". This was lucky in the sense that my not-quite-10"-squares worked well for the project, but unlucky in the sense that I spent something like five hours sewing, pressing, sewing again, and trimming all ninety-nine blocks. Don't they look pretty all neatly stacked up there?

I realized two things after the sewing and trimming marathon: First, I tend to hunch over a bit at my machine... I think I was trying to get a better perspective on the fabric going under my ¼" presser foot, because with ½" finished sashing, you have to be painfully exact. Second, all that trimming is hard on your back, too. Spending that much time hunched over my machine and then hunched over my cutting table has left me very sore today!

(first three rows)

But as I started laying out the rows, I decided it was all worth it. Also, it seems the worst is behind me. It only took me a few hours this afternoon to assemble seven of the eleven rows. I'm hoping to have the top done by the end of the week. I'm pretty excited about this quilt... the one I gave my mom for her birthday back in 2005 is getting a bit ratty.