My first free motion quilt!

I guess I'm always really excited to post any new craft I do, but I am REALLY excited about this quilt!  ...because.... it's my FIRST free motion quilt!  Ever since I first started looking at quilting blogs and decided that I wanted to learn to make them, I have admired all the quilts that had free motion quilting.  But I was intimidated by it, so I put off learning how to do it until now.  I got a darning foot last month and I started practicing on Monday (Oct 3) with it for the first time.  Here is the first mini quilt sandwich I practiced on:

If you look to the bottom right of the second picture, you can see how messed up the thread tension was (it kind of looks like a spiderweb because the top thread is pulling through to the wrong side).  I had to mess around with the tension for a while before I got it looking better.  I am still working on learning about setting the tension.  Sometimes it will all the sudden not work, like if I put in a new bobbin or if I have turned off my machine for a while and come back to it later.  It doesn't make sense to me because it was working at a certain thread tension setting for the whole time and then all the sudden that setting doesn't work.  I get really angry when that happens, but I guess it's just a part of learning.

I got most of the piecing and all of the basting of this quilt done during General Conference.  Tony took pictures of me during the Sunday (Oct 2) morning session:

This one is my personal favorite.  I don't know how Tony kept his eyes on conference with an amazing view like that in front of him.

He took these the next day (Oct 3) when I was free motion quilting for the first time.  (I promise I don't make him take pictures of me - except for my baby bump pictures, I always nag him to take those ones - he just likes playing with the camera and I like documenting everything, so I'm fine with him taking as many pictures as he wants!)

And here is the finished product (which will be a surprise gift for a certain someone)....

Don't you just LOVE staring at those swirly lines?  Me too!!

This quilt is far from perfect but I still love it.  I love quilting and have had so much fun so far developing this new talent.  Free motion quilting is frustrating at times but mostly it's not that hard and it's really fun.  I think every quilt I make from now on will be free motion quilted because I like doing it so much!  I can't wait to make my next quilt!

This was a long post and probably boring if you don't care about quilts.  Gold star for you if you're still reading now!