Success!

In addition to being unemployed, I'm also theoretically moving to Portland. It's taken a bit of time to furnish and prepare my new place, and while that's been exciting,  I've been dragging my feet getting up there. Partly because I'll really and truly have to find a place for my dog, because she's too big for my new place, and partly because I just can't get motivated to leave the place I'm living now. I did go up on Friday and get mattresses though, so I can finally sleep up there on a bed, instead of on the couch.

While I was there, I met up with my friend Jennifer for a quick cup of coffee. I took this picture of her, and asked if I could use it in my blog. It didn't occur to me that she would ask to read my blog though! It's just that devoting myself to writing about this particular topic is a little new, and I suppose it may be a little different than expected. 

This flowers below are the craft project I used to fill my time before I started the quilt. It was a lot of fun to make these, and best of all, I can't kill them like I do all real plants in my care.
And, I finished the quilt! I found a pretty blue backing at JoAnn's (which was way better than Wal-Mart, and more price friendly than The Quilted Village) and finished the quilting and binding. Here it is in a natural habitat.
The quilting itself was a bit frustrating, but only because I had no idea what I was doing. Making the quilt top itself had three pages of instructions and diagrams. The binding process had at least thirteen steps listed in the directions. 

The actual quilting instructions simply read "Quilt as desired".

Wait, what? What does that mean? I had intended to hand quilt it, but got about a half an hour in when I realized it would take me weeks to finish. Maybe I'll try hand quilting something smaller. I don't quite know how people make all the really pretty designs, as I found it quite cumbersome to deal with the bulk of the quilt on the sewing machine. I ended up just doing straight lines with a fancy stitch.

I might have researched more options on how to do it, but I think I was mostly concerned with just finishing! Now, onto the next project!