Very first quilt

I hope this will be the first of many posts about my sewing.

My friends, Kyle and Kim, have a daughter, Keziah. She will be turning 3 this month and her birthday party is Saturday. I will be baking her a princess cake but I also wanted to make her something. What do you make a 3 year old that will be special and not outgrow?

I decided to make her a quilt. Now, I know it was pretty ambitious of me to choose a quilt as my first major sewing project, but I have a friend who does quilting so I had all the confidence that she would not let me make a crappy quilt.
It all started with the fabric. First off, let me explain to you that I'm not a very good decision maker. I had talked to my friend about having a sewing party and so we were throwing ideas around, but I just couldn't make up my mind. I made my sister go with me to Joann so I could look around. Well when I'm in Joann, I'm like a kid in a candy store. Sewing has endless possibilities and I had no idea what I wanted. When I decided to make Keziah a quilt, picking the fabric was not as hard as deciding on what to make. So my sister and I picked 2 polka dot fabrics, 2 heart fabrics, and 2 butterfly fabrics. We also chose a nice pink for the backing.
Ok I forgot to take pictures of all the steps, so just pretend I spent over an hour cutting out squares, sewing 2 together, then 4 together, then laying them out so I can get the quilt to look the way I want it, and then sewing everything together. And Tricia and Catherine helped too, so we had a really nice assembly line going.
So now, I sewed on the border. So pretend Tricia cut out pieces to make the border and then sewed them together. Now I'm sewing the border to the quilt.
Then it was a group effort with the ironing. We ironed it flat so it would look nicer. Those are Tricia's hands but it's my shirt and Catherine is taking the picture. Team work guys, team work!
Then we laid the backing on the table, then put the batting on top of that, then the quilt on top of that. We used safety pins (while making sure not to scratch Tricia's new table) to pin all the layers together. We put a pin in each square and then on the bordering.
This is Tricia using her awesome, heavy duty machine to make the squiggles on the quilt. While she's doing this, Catherine and I are happily licking beaters to the awesome cookies that she made! Catherine, I'm going to need that recipe please! This process took Tricia a whole 7 minutes to do. Maybe longer, maybe shorter, but the point is: SHE'S AWESOME!!!
All the while, Gus is trying to get her afternoon nap. That's kinda hard to do at Tricia's because she has 5 kids, ranging from 14-5 (or 6, I can't remember) and 2 dogs. Everytime Gus got to snoozin, the kids or dogs wanted to play with her.
So then to make the edging, we cut pieces out of the scrap fabric. Since we didn't take cutting pictures with the squares, here's a good shot of me cutting the edging.
While I'm doing the cutting, Catherine is taking out the safety pins while trying to fight off Gus from taking a nap on the quilt.
So now it's time to sew the front side of the edging on. Pretend you saw pictures of Tricia sewing the edging pieces together and all of us ironing. Team work!
Now this part I thought was particularly tricky. After sewing one side of the edging on, you fold it over and sew along the line for the front part. I can't really explain it, but it was hard for me.
1.) I can't really sew in a straight line very well.
2.) It was really hard.
3.) I can't really sew in a straight line very well.
This part took the longest, I think. If not, it sure did seem like it. Tricia offered to do it for me, but I wanted to do it. I should have just let her. I mean, who would have known, right?
But in the end, it was all worth it. It took 3 of us 5 hours to do this whole thing from start to finish, give or take a few minutes. Not too shabby huh?
I can't wait to see Keziah's face when she sees this. I'm going to see what kind of left over fabric I have and maybe try to make her a matching something or other.

So there it is, my very first quilt. It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be and it wasn't as overwhelming either. I had a great teacher helping me and Catherine was a big help too. Thank you ladies for everything. And thank you, Tricia's kids, for wearing out Gus. She's been sleeping since we got home and has hardly moved. :)