Quilting

This week, I'm going to talk about my first ever quilting project. A while back, I got the idea in my head that I needed an exercise mat. I'm not really sure why, because I don't actually exercise indoors all that often (I like to walk), and when I do, a towel or blanket on the floor usually works great, but meh, when my mind gets an idea stuck in it, I have a hard time shaking it. However, I knew I didn't want to just go out and buy one, so I decided to go through my fabric bin and see what I could come up with. What I found was an old pair of curtains I made for our NY house that had a light olive green fabric up top and a cream/floral pattern on the bottom. So my mat is recycled. How do you like that? Even my off-white border pieces came from old curtains.

I lost interest in this project for a while, but I'm happy to report that I finally finished it, in time for New Years, even. New yoga routine, here I come!

Here's a pic of the top part all pieced together; I was honestly amazed at how fast it went together.  It took me all of two hours to go from pieces to pinned and ready for quilting. What did take forever, was cutting the pieces out. That was not fun, I'm not gonna lie. But hey, once that was over, it was smooth sailing. Even the quilting went fast, because (shh, don't tell my mother-in-law) I machine quilted it. Now, I had every intention to hand quilt this baby - I bought a quilt hoop and everything! But I had finished my first square and was starting my second when I said to myself, "Why are you doing this by hand? It's just straight lines. You'll get done so much faster if you machine it." And you know what? I was right; it was much faster. I did learn that I can't do quilting on my machine for anything much bigger than this mat, because keeping everything from bunching up would be nigh impossible. And of course, if I do anything other than straight lines, it would be best if I did them by hand, but for now, the quilting is done, and I'm pleased with how it turned out. It's not perfect, but it's good for a first try. 

The final step was binding it all together. I got my bias tape and started stitching, but about 1/3 of the way through, it became blatantly obvious that I didn't know what I was doing. The bias tape wouldn't stop bunching, and even with pins, I sometimes was missing the quilt all together. A quick call to the quilting expert, AKA mom-in-law revealed that I had to hand-stitch the binding, or at least one part of it. Now, all that being said, I still decided to finish the binding the way I started, just so the bad part wouldn't look even worse by comparison. Is that wrong? Even so, my exercise mat turned out pretty nice. Not bad at all for a first attempt. Take a look:

I even added ties so it rolls up!