Finished quilt!

I literally spent every moment I was at home the past few days working on the Happy Campers quilt. It got to the point where I wasn't very happy with it at all...

The quilting looks sloppy in many places — it's amazingly difficult to sew a straight line using a darning foot with your feed dogs down.

The thread tension is messed up in so many places — I swear the tension kept changing as I quilted it. I would test on scraps, start out just fine, and then later it would be all messed up. I could only rip out and re-quilt so much of it. I mean, it has to be done in time. I think it may have to be re-quilted at some point in the future.

Oh! And somehow the binding wound up being too big. I made do, but it still looks a little funky to me.

After spending a couple hours Sunday night and five straight hours Monday tying off and hiding thread ends from the quilting on the Happy Campers quilt, I decided to forgo the appliqué all together. This is largely due to time constraints, but I'm justifying by reasoning that the appliqué may be a bit too cutesy for my dad, and now I can use those charm squares to make him some matching potholders or a pillow for Father's Day. So it's a total cop-out, maybe, but I finished! And I got to use a little bit of the selvage in the label, which I really like:

Now that I have the label put on, and I'm not looking at it so closely, I'm a lot happier with it. It's a big-picture kinda thing.

ps: I just signed up for round 3 of the Potholder Pass. (Don't worry, the deadline isn't till May 31...) Isn't the button absolutely precious?