I finished the quilt!

My fingers are sore and I'm very tired but the quilts are finished for Harri and Cris. They have been washed and are in the dryer and if the weather permits, they will be with the boys this evening. Both patterns are from the Quilter's World magazine, Feb, 2008 and my sister, their grandmother, had purchased the fabrics before she died in 2009. It has been my great honor and pleasure to complete these quilts for her grandsons. In fact, my last conversation with Jan, a few hours before she died, was of how we were going to work together on making these quilts when she recovered. Jan has been in my thoughts every time I've sat down to work on these quilts--it's as tho she has guided my hands as I sew the patterns.

Here is Hari's "Lunch of the Penguins" quilt. Sorry it's so blurry. It looks a lot clearer in the camera--I don't know how to fix it. The quilt is a large crib sized one and since he's not yet 3, he should do just fine with it. I quilted this one with a horizontal, elongated meander to make it look like the blues are ice. In the outer border I did an ordinary meander. And the penguins I simply outlined and stitched in their bodies along their wings.

Cris's twin sized quilt is called "Arctic Adventure," and it has polar bears and birch trees in the fabrics. This is the one I challenged myself to finish between Monday night and Friday--and it's done!

This quilt gave my so much trouble because I neglected to iron the backing fabric and got a lot of pleats and tucks in it that I had to painstakingly take out and resew. There are still a few tucks in there but I think when it's washed and dried, they'll disappear in the overall puckering of the quilt.
This is a close up of the quilting I did along the inner borders and you can see some of the overall design I did in the quilt center. I repeated the center design in the outer border but added some of the spiraling that I'd used in the inner border. I'm really pleased at how will it turned out despite my screwing up on something so basic!

These are a couple of shots of the pleating I sewed in the back. There was a fold like across the width of the quilt and every time I stitched across that fold, I got a pucker, some worse than others. I ripped out the stitches and used lots of straight pins to flatten the excess fabric--like you do when you're setting in a sleeve--and then carefully stitched over the pins and hoped for the best. Most of the time I only had to do this once.

That's the saga of Harri and Cris's quilts--I hope they like them.