Christmas Quilt 2012

You may remember me talking about this quilt, if you follow me on Facebook. I made this quilt for my brother and his family for Christmas. I had started this quilt about 12 years ago. I had all the pieces cut and little bits sewn. It was supposed to be a queen size. Somewhere along the lines, it got put away and forgot about it. A couple years ago, I rediscovered it, but decided I no longer wanted it to be a queen. Instead, I divided the blocks and made 2 lap-size-ish quilts. The first, I gave to my older brother in 2011. You can see that one here. So here's the second quilt ...

This quilt gave me a few problems. Or rather, I gave it a few problems. If I remember right, I found about 6 blocks that were sewn wrong. Of course, I didn't realize this until I started quilting it. I also had great plans to quilt some winter/christmas related doodle in each of the blocks. I quilted the first row and a half and didn't like what I had done. So I spent a couple days unpicking it all. After all that unpicking (and disappointment in myself) I decided not to quilt something fancy each in block. That way it would still have a little poof and not leave me time crunching for the rest of my christmas projects.

There was another small mishap during quilting. I got to a certain spot where my needle broke. Not thinking anything of it, I changed my needle. It broke again. I changed it, again. I may or may not have broken a third needle. I really don't remember. Nontheless, I checked the area, and the needle seemed to be hitting something. My first thought was the feed dogs. I mean, what else could it be, right?

Nope, everything seemed fine.

That only left the quilt itself.

Can you see it? It's a penny! My kids had been playing with coins while I was pin basting the quilt. One of them obviously landed while I was pinning, of course, without me seeing.

There really was no way of getting the penny out; at least, not without unpicking at least 10 inches of quilting. I did the only thing I could do, stitch around it. I told my brother about it, in case something happened while washing it.

Plus, I think it makes for a great story :)