Stuffed Monsters

For cb, Barracuda, and E's birthdays, and for T and M for Christmas this year, I decided to make them some stuffed monsters. I got the idea from here and pretty much followed her instructions, so I won't repeat the instructions on my blog. Just a few additional tips:

- To get a larger variety of colors, I bought a packet of paper-sized felt instead of buying it by the yard. This way, each monster required 2 pieces of felt (one for the front and one for the back) with plenty of scraps to use for eyes and other accessories.

- Don't make the arms and legs (or any other part for that matter) too narrow. The more narrow, the more difficult it is to stuff. Try to keep everything wide enough that you can fit your index finger in after it is sewn together. Even if your finger doesn't fit, you can still use a pencil or other similar device to stuff those areas.

- Once you've sewn the front and back together, make sure everything you thought was sewn together is actually sewn together. Once I started stuffing, there were a few places that I noticed holes in my top-stitching. I ended up having to close those by hand, which was really annoying.

- Also, make sure the opening you leave is as small as you can make it and still stuff through it and make sure it is on a straight edge. The closer it is to an arm or leg or other non-straight part, the more difficult it will be to sew closed because those other stuffed parts will get in the way, especially when back-stitching.

I think these little guys turned out adorably - too bad I have to wait until December (and February and June) to get the kid's reactions.

Chair Upgrade

I know I've mentioned it somewhere on this blog but to recap, a long time ago, like February 2013, I bought three chairs for the purpose of re-upholstering and repainting them in order to customize them so they'd look really nice in my house. Well, I finally finished one. Yes, it took about two and half years but I'm done. . . with one. I actually finished it several weeks ago but I've been busy so I haven't posted yet. Busy with what? Well, I'm selling the house, so I've been busy getting it in order. That was also my final motivation for finally finishing the chair.

My original plan was to do a detailed blog about how to do something like this, but two and a half years later I've decided I'm not going to go into detail. There are already lots of blogs out there with all the details so I'll keep mine pretty top level.

Overall, it was a fun, not too hard, not too expensive project.

The "before" chair just before getting started. The first steps, obviously, were taking it apart. The base of the chair was pretty easy - a couple of screws. Getting the fabric off was another story. There were lots and lots and lots of staples. Lots of staples and each had to be taken out one at a time. To do so I used a flat head screw driver, some needle nose pliers, and lots of elbow grease. I got blisters from this but it was kind of fun. Once the staples were off I set aside the fabric and piping and took the batting and cushions off. The finished chair has the same seat base with the original springs.

I decided to leave the black stuff in the middle. I think it might have some cushion in the middle but it all seemed to be in pretty good condition so I figured I would save myself a few steps and leave it. After getting everything apart I made an attempt to use some kind of liquid sand paper stuff to take off the original finish. I don't think I'll do this with the other two chairs. It was a ton of work and I'm not sure I did a great job. Plus, the step afterward is priming with an oil based primer (the same primer I used with those gross shelves) that sticks to everything. I don't see the point in doing both steps in the future. By the way, I think I did two coats of primer.

After priming I painted. This chair is yellow; it is the same paint I used on my dining room walls. I had a really hard time getting the lid off the can of paint so what was left is all dried up now so my other chairs may end up being a different color. This should be fine since they will also have a different fabric (the white backed floral in the top photo). I did two coats of paint.

For the new fabric, I kept all the original fabric (I labeled it as I took it off so I would know how to put it back together) and laid it out on the new fabric then cut the new fabric using the old fabric as a pattern. This worked out really nicely. I also used the front and back original fabrics as well as the seat's original fabric to create a pattern for the cushions. I don't have any pictures of that but it was easy enough. After the fabric was cut, I sewed the the seat fabric together and sewed the piping. For the seat's piping I used the original piping, which worked out beautifully, but my sewing machine didn't like the original piping that was on the front and back of the chair so I bought new piping for that . . . and hated it. It was a lot flimsier than the original piping so I didn't know how I was going to end up stapling it to the chair without the staples showing. Once I had everything sewed, I avoided putting it back together because I didn't like the piping. Then I had an epiphany - don't staple the piping, hot glue it. Duh, right? So I staples everything (which is so much fun - I love my staple gun!) then glued the piping, screwed the cushion back on, and now it is all done and I'm really happy with it.

Latest Quilt: Rainbow

I just finished this one. It was inspired by something I saw on Pinterest but I changed some things to make it my own.

It was pretty simple to piece and quilt. The piecing is white fabric with six colored stripes. I also used fabric from the rainbow stripes to create the binding. For the quilting, I simply quilted on the outside edge of each color then quilted clouds in the white above the rainbow then some broken, straight blue lines for rain below the rainbow.

The hope was that the quilting would show a picture on the back of the quilt but that didn't work out quite like I had hoped. The back is a gray fabric and you can see some of the quilting but I should have triple stitched the quilting in order for the colors to show up better. Now I know.

Pocket Pillows

Yes, I originally saw this on Pinterest and I immediately loved it. What's better than having a pillow with a pocket? (Ok, dresses with pockets are up there but this is still super cool.) I've decided that my nieces and nephews are getting these, plus a book of course, for their birthdays this year.

The original pin I found didn't have very straight-forward instructions on how to make the pillow so I figured it out myself.

Fabric you'll need:
A - (2) 20 x 20 inch
B - (1) 11 x 21 inch
C - (1) 13 x 21 inch
D - large-ish scraps for letters (optional)
E - (2) 11 x 1.5 inch

Yes, B & C are wider than A. This will help ensure that the pocket is big enough to actually fit stuff in it. You'll also need thread and about 14 - 20 ounces of filling, depending on how firm you want the pillow.

Steps:
1. Sew both E pieces right side together on the long sides only. Turn it right side out.
2. Sew B and C wrong sides together so that three sides meet, only sew those three sides.
3. Fold over the extra fabric on the top twice (so the outside edge is the nice edge) and sew.
4. Sew your letters to A1.
5. Place A1 right side up. Lay E on top so that the ends meet the edge of A1 and the middle is on the inside (Once you place the rest of the layers down, you will only be able to see the ends of E). On top of that place B+C B side down and A2 right side down. While pinning you'll notice the extra inch on B+C; make sure the pin the edges so they meet the edges of both A fabrics. This keeps the extra inch of fabric in the middle and gives the pocket extra space.
6. Sew on all sides leaving about 1.5 inches open.
7. Turn the pillow right side out; stuff it through the opening.
8. Hand sew the opening closed.

Latest Quilt: Bright Triangles

The quilt I finished this week is for my cousin who is due with her first later this month. (The baby shower was several weeks ago. I had the quilt pieced and the triangles sewn to the back but it wasn't quilted yet. Sorry it's late!)

This is the first time I used my triangle tool. My goal was to create a quilt that was 40 x 40 inches so I figured I would do ten 4 inch triangles across the bottom. That didn't work out how I had planned. The 4 1/2 inch line on the tool is 4 1/2 inches in height (my quilt would have been the correct 40 inches tall but that didn't work our either - more on that later) but the triangles were almost a full 5 inches wide at the bottom. The quilt did end up being about 40 inches wide but that was only because I cut off some extra width because the quilt back was already cut to the right size.

So, now I know the triangle's height is not equal to its base's width.

If you look really closely, you can see that my pieced triangles are blunted at the top, squared instead of pointed. The goal was to have the triangles come to a point. This didn't work because I didn't piece the triangles quite right. In the picture below you can see two of my triangles pieced together - a blue and white one and a multi-color one with hexagons and diamonds. You can see that the point of the blue triangle is far outside the seem allowance for the multi-color triangle. When I pieced the next row of triangles, this not only made my triangle tips blunted but also made the quilt a little shorter than I had planned.

So, now I know to piece my triangles so they line up properly.

It took me a long time to decide how to do the quilting for this one. I still wasn't sure when I first basted it. I ended up quilting around the solid orange, solid blue, brown, and diamond green triangles with the same color thread as the fabric. Unfortunately this wasn't as easy as I had hoped it would be because it required almost constant rotating of the fabric as I quilted. I thought about doing it free-hand with the embroidery needle in the machine but decided against that because I didn't think my lines would end up very straight.

Because of the colors, you can't see the quilting very well on the pieced side and it is also pretty subtle on the back - and I like that. I like that the back ended up with subtle, random triangles quilted into it.

Overall, I really like this quilt. The colors were fun to work with and I learned a good deal about working with triangles.

Latest Quilt - Blue Corners

This quilt was made for J2.0, who was born just a few days ago.

The piecing on this one was really easy, just a bunch of long, thick rectangles. The quilting was pretty easy too. Other than the dark blue stripes, every stripe just got a straight line near the seam. The dark blue areas are quilted with circles, which were easy enough to do but I will probably never do anything like that again because cutting all the strings between on the circles took forever and nearly gave me blisters.

I learned that all the little quilting can pull the fabric. After the quilting was done, but before I did the binding, you could see that the blue stripes were a little shorter than the other stripes. Not a big deal but good to know for the future.

Latest Quilt

Here is my latest quilt made for a nephew, M, who was due in late September but decided to come a little early.  One of the bonuses of coming early was I knew what his name was before I was done with the quilt and could applique his name on the quilt.

For this quilt I wanted to do an argyle pattern but I didn't want to figure out how to deal with non-right angle diamonds so I went with a modified argyle where I just used rotated squares quilted through the middle.

Putting the squares on their sides made figuring out the size the squares needed to be difficult. I got out some graph paper and mapped out the quilt and tried to figure out my measurements there but, apparently, that didn't work out very well because all my squares are smaller than they should have been. The original plan was to only have the argyle pattern with the orange border but, since my squares were too small, I ended up having to add the blue border (good thing I accidentally bought too much fabric). However, the blue border came in handy when trying to figure out how to do the quilting around the name applique - so I guess it all worked out in the end.


With this quilt I also did triangles for the first time.  I didn't have a triangle tool and I didn't want to pull trigonometry out of my head so I kind of winged the first few by taking cut squares and trimming them into a triangle where I thought they needed to be trimmed. That actually worked beautifully. Some of the triangles were a little big (maybe 1/8 - 1/4 of an inch too long) but that was fine because the excess was just cut off or sewn into the seam.

Another first with this quilt was having a border on both the front and the back - having both orange borders was planned from the beginning.  This made lining up the two sides and the batting a little more time consuming because I wanted to make sure the borders were nearly perfectly lined up so that the quilting would look good. It took extra time but it wasn't difficult (because everything was measured carefully) and I probably wouldn't hesitate too much to do something like that again.

Overall, I think the quilt turned out really cute. I like the orange, blue, and brown color combination.  I figured that since the colors were so bright I should use a more muted color for the quilting.  I went with a gray and triple stitched the quilting to make sure it showed up well.

I hope M likes it.

Dress Alteration

A few months ago, maybe mid-December, I went to JCPenney's to do some dress shopping.  I probably tried on 30 or so dresses because I went in with low expectations.  I was sure I was only going to be able to find something that needed some kind of alteration.  Well, I found three dresses that looked good on me and (probably) wouldn't need any alterations to make them work.  Unfortunately I only had the budget for two, so the one you see here is the one I didn't get.

Fast forward a month or so and I was at Penney's again. I decided to stop by the dress section and I found that third dress on clearance for $14.  By that time I had $14 in my budget for a new dress so I scooped it up.

While trying it on it felt like it was going to be long enough but the first time I wore it it felt just a little too short.  So I decided to lengthen it.  The original hem used that fancy stitch (I can never remember what it is called) that doesn't actually show the stitching and I don't remember how to do that and I didn't want to figure out how to do that plus everywhere else on the dress had a little black lining, so I decided to finish the hem with a similar black lining.  And it was easy.  Here's what I did.

Step 1 - Take out the hem.

Step 2 - Do some measuring. I measured the width of the black lining on the other parts of the dress (about 1/4 inch) and of the stitching at the hem (also about 1/4 inch).  This led me to believe that I would need at least a full inch of fabric for my lining: 1/4 inch on each side to match the lining and hide the stitching + 1/4 inch on each side for a seam allowance.

Side note: I actually used about 1 1/4 inch fabric just to be sure.

Step 3 - Cut and iron the fabric.  Once I had a long strip of black fabric, long enough to go all the way around the bottom of the dress, I ironed it.  If you are a talented enough sewer, you could probably skip all or part of this step but I'm going to say what I did even if it wasn't necessary.  I started by ironing the strip in half width ways.  After that, I folded the outer sides into my new crease and folded them down.  That is all.

Step 4 - Pin and sew.  I started by laying the black fabric so that the ends that were sewn to the middle were on top.  I then placed my dress hem on top - right side up (this means the dress was inside out and the inside of the dress was toward the black fabric's ends).  Then I pinned.  Then I sewed.  To finish the ends together I did it kind of like I do the binding on a quilt - when I got close, I sewed the two ends together so the black strip was one big circle, then just finished sewing the strip onto the skirt hem.

As you can see in the last image, I got about 1 1/2 inches of extra length on the dress, so it should be perfect now!

Latest Quilt

 I've made another quilt. This is the first one I've made for someone who isn't born yet. Barracuda is due at the beginning of March so I tried to make this quilt spring-y.

I chose a subway tile type pattern because, well, it looked fun.  Somehow my longest tiles ended up  being 1/8 of an inch too long each so I had to sew a little extra to all the background rows between but, luckily, the background pattern is really busy so it is nearly impossible to tell that I had to add those pieces.

While I was at the fabric store I chose the paisley fabric first, I just fell in love with it.  From there I chose the other two greens and decided to use the yellow as binding because it added a little brightness to the whole quilt.

It took me a while to decide how to quilt the quilt but I ended up doing a whimsical, curly line around all the tiles.  I did this the same way I did c.b.'s quilt: freehand using the embroidery foot. The biggest lesson I learned was to make sure the fabric was pulled tight as I quilted because I ended up with some loose fabric between tiles.

I also used the whimsical, curly line for my binding.  I thought it would be super cute and, well, it is.  I learned several lessons here (see the next picture for the big, nasty one), one of which is that if you forget to put your sewing machine's feet down when sewing free-hand, it isn't a huge deal.  I also learned that if the fabric is too thick for the sewing machine needle, the machine will beep at me.  I ended up having to do a little of the binding by hand - in some places you can tell but in one place (on the front) it looks pretty good.

The biggest lesson that I learned with this binding was that I didn't do it very well.  As you can see, my tension was off. Even though I did a test with several layers of fabric (I got the tension perfect in the test, it really was beautiful)  I just couldn't get the tension right while actually quilting.  I ended up giving up on trying to fix the tension so I'll just try to convince everyone to never look at the back side of this quilt.

I think a contributing factor was the the quilt side was just two layers of fabric and one layer of 6 oz batting while the binding side was up to 6 layers of fabric plus the binding, so getting the same tension to work on both was a tall order to begin with.

If anyone has any ideas about how I could have done this better, I'd love to hear it.

Activity Days: Felt Piggy Bank

Our activity for Activity Days is tomorrow and we are going to have a lesson and activity on Tithing and Budgeting.  A while ago on Pinterest (duh) I found this pin - four super cute felt piggy banks.  I was hoping the link went to a tutorial but it didn't, it went to a store where you could buy the product.

Anyway, I thought these would be a really cute handout for the Tithing and Budgeting lesson so I decided to make some myself, which was super easy.

Step One: Cut out an even number pigs from felt (see below the pattern that I used).  Honestly, this was the hardest step.

Step Two: Sew a button hole near the top of half of the pigs.  Because these were going to be used for money, instead of using a button to determine the size of my button hole I used a quarter.

Step Three: Top stitch together one pig without a hole and one pig with a hole.

Done.

Sewing Room Shelves

Here are what the selves look like with some sewing stuff on them.

1. Supporting materials such as a quilt batting and interfacing.  These were too tall to put on the regular shelves so I put them on the top shelf of the shelf that didn't have a top.

2. Large bolt fabrics.  There was too much of these fabrics to put on the smaller bots so they also ended up on the only shelf they would fit on.

3. This is a project in process - right on top and easy to get to.

4. This is an organizer for smaller, notion type things.  It doesn't have much in it right now but in mine I have thread, pins, elastic, safety pins, etc.

5. Patterns.  My mom has a lot of patterns.  The large, clear box (provided by Mom) has non-adult girls patterns, the larger purple box (provided by me) has adult women patterns and the other, smaller purple box has adult men/unisex patterns.

6. Flannel. JoAnn had a sale on flannel earlier this year and this is what Mom got.  There is some really cute stuff here.

7. Felt scraps.  The container (provided by Mom) is about the size of a piece of felt so all her single pieces of felt plus all her scrap felt is in there.

8. Felt by the yard.

9. Heirloom scraps.  Mom is going to make an heirloom quilt using memorable fabrics so, if I recognized a fabric from my childhood or as something special, it went in this box (provided by Mom).

10. Other fabrics such as lace and tulle.

11. Patterned fabrics.

12. Patterns.  The box on the left is costumes while the box on the right is craft patterns.

13. The fabrics on the bottom shelves are solid colored or mostly one color.

14. Other scraps.

Latest Quilt

I finished my fourth quilt yesterday.  This one is for c.b.'s second birthday in December, which is why it is winter themed.

Over here on the left are some closer images of the fabric so you can see that the one side has snowflakes and snowmen on it (it is pretty clear that the other side is just snowflakes) and that both sides have a fun glittery touch (harder to see on just the snowflake side, sorry).  I don't know if you can tell from these pictures but the binding is a white on white holly leaf pattern.  The leaves themselves have a different texture than the background which I think gives it a nice touch.

The other fabric I was considereing was a gingerbread fabric that was super cute with a candy can binding but I couldn't find a third fabric that I liked for the other side of the quilt.  I guess I could have used the same main fabric on both sides or used the same fabric for one side plus the binding but I just wasn't feeling either of those options at the time I bought the fabric.

As you can see, unlike the other quilts I've made, this quilt didn't have any peicing.  I wanted to try the quilting free hand with my embroidery foot so I didn't want to also complicate things by needing to peice the quilt as well.

By the way, I loved using the embroidery foot and I think I'm going to have to find other ways to use it in the future; maybe figure out how to do some embroidery - shocking, I know.

Anyway, there was a bit of a learning curve for this kind of quilting and I knew there would be which is why I tested on some scrap fabric and batting first.  The actual movements were easy to get down and that took about a minute and a half but the thread tension, speed of the foot (how fast the needle moves), and speed of my movements was a lot more difficult.

In the third picture down on the left I've highlighted in yellow some ugly spots.  If you look real close you can see that my tension appears to be off around the edges but not so much on the straighter parts of the stiching.  In places like this either my tension was off, I was moving the fabric too fast for the speed of the needle, or I wasn't moving the needle fast enough for the speed of the fabric movement.  Or a combination I suppose.

However, with some practice I was able to get into a groove for most of the quilt and it generally looks more like the bottom picture, with even stitches.

On a side note, I also noticed that the more I quilted, the closer my curved lines got to each other.  You probably can't tell in these pictures but the corner where I started is quilted much wider than the corner where I finished.  I figure that was a confidance issue with the quilting method.

Anyway, I love this quilt and I loved this quilting method so plan on seeing more of it in the future.

Lastest Quilt

I made another quilt.  As I'm sure you can clearly see, this one is 4th of July themed.  It is a Christmas gift for my newest nephew, born in early July.  If you look at the first image just right (or just wrong) the stripes look like they taper off on the ends but they are really all the same width everywhere.

My favorite part of the quilt is the star applique on the back.  I ironed the stars on to the back then, after all three layers of the quilt were put together, I started the quilting process by appliqueing the star with a close zig-zag stick.  That way you can (kindof) see the star shapes on the front of the quilt (middle image).  CJ later pointed out that the applique would have looked better in a different color, maybe gold, and I totally agree.  Instead of using matching red thread while doing the all the quilting, I could have used a goldy-yellow color for a fun contrasting look.  Oh well, maybe next time.

Latest Quilt

I just finished my second quilt ever.  This one is about one square yard (36 inches by 36 inches) and I made it for my niece's 2nd birthday . . . in September.  Yup, I finished it a little early but I guess that just means I get to start the next one sooner than I thought I would (for a nephew's Christmas gift).

Attaching My Even Feed/Walking Foot

It seriously took me almost an hour today to figure out how to attach my even feed/walking foot to my sewing machine.

Here are the instructions my sewing machine told me (it also had a picture, which was only a little helpful):
1. Raise needle to its highest position.
2. Raise presser bar to its highest position and guide the even feed/walking foot into position from rear of machine with arm on needle clamp.
3. Attach presser bar clamp to presser bar and tighten presser foot screw with screwdriver.

By the way, my machine is a Singer 7467S.

The picture helps a little (especially now that I really know what I'm doing) to figure out what the presser bar clamp and such are but the instructions never said to remove the regular shank, which is absolutely required in order to do step #3.  So I was trying to attach the even feed/walking foot while the regular shank was still attached to the machine, which, obviously, didn't work very well.

Then I found this YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVczdRK_K6s. This video tutorial has a lot of information about a lot of different sewing machine feet.  I had to wait until minute 11:30 to get to the even feed section, but it was totally worth it.

Here are my instructions with pictures.

This is the way my sewing machine usually looks.  The regular shank (green arrow) is attached to the machine and the satin foot is attached to the regular shank.

Step One: Turn off the machine.  It may be tempting to keep it on because it will add some light, but don't do it.

Step Two (optional): Remove the foot from the regular shaft by lightly pressing the Foot Release Button (purple arrow). This is optional because if you leave it on it with automatically come off in Step Three.

Step Three: Unscrew the Presser Foot Screw (blue arrow).  In the video I linked to above, they make this look easy but it was not easy for me.  I couldn't use the little screw driver deal that came with my machine, I had to go get a thick, flat head screwdriver to loosen it.  Once the presser foot screw is loose, it is easy to unscrew by hand.

Step Four: Remove the Regular Shank from the Presser Bar (pink arrow).

Step Five: (mostly from the manual instructions) Guide the even feed/walking foot into position from the rear of the machine with the Arm (yellow arrow) on the Needle Clamp (brown arrow) and the Presser Bar Clamp (orange arrow) around the Presser Bar.

Step Six: Screw the presser foot screw back into it's place on the presser bar.

You should now be good to go.

I'm using the Even Feed/Walking Foot to help me quilt some hot pads I'm making.  The hot pads have five layers (outside fabric, muslin for sturdiness, thick batting, muslin, outside fabric) and I wanted to make sure that every layer of my hot pad fed through the sewing machine evenly.  Luckily the Walking Foot is perfect for this kind of task because it has feed dogs on the foot itself.  This means that the feed dogs on the machine are feeding the bottom layers of fabric through the machine at the same time/rate that the feed dogs on the walking foot are feeding the top layers of fabric through the machine.  A perfect combination.

Anyway, I love this foot and I very much wish I had know about it when I made my first quilt but I guess it is too late for that.  Now that I know how to attach it to my machine I hope to get a lot of use out of it.

That Was Easy

I would just like to take a second to thank my sewing machine for making it really, really easy to put a blanket stitch on my niece's fleece blanket birthday gift.  I simply chose the setting and sewed.  All the way around 2 yards of fleece took about 20 minutes.  I don't think it could have been easier.

My First Quilt

So, I made a quilt.  A long, long time ago I bought some light green fabric and some black fabric and some black and white fabric so now that I have a sewing machine I figured I'd make a quilt out of that old fabric I had laying around.  I also decided to use the old fabric because I didn't want to go out and buy all kinds of cute fabric then potentially ruin it.

Before I started I made sure to reference a blog that has a quilt making tutorial: Diary of a Quilter.  I didn't follow the tutorial exactly because the fabric I had for the backing wasn't the same size as her fabric, I didn't use all the tools she did because I didn't have them, and I didn't add a border because I didn't have enough fabric.  Otherwise I followed it pretty closely.

If I could start over I'd do a few things differently but, overall, I think my first quilt turned out ok.

Steps:
1. I started by measuring the fabric I was planning on using for backing.  From there I figured out how many 3 inch (well, 3.5 inch to account for seams) squares I would need for the front.  I divided that number by two (because I'd be using 2 fabrics) then cut out the appropriate number of squares from the green and the black fabrics.

2.  Once all the squares were cut out, I laid out the pieces to see what the finished quilt might look like.

3. Satisfied with the look, I took each of the squares in order and set them in their individual rows.

4. I sewed each square in the row with a 1/4 inch seem.  When a row was finished I marked the first square in the row with a pin so I wouldn't get the rows mixed up and backwards or what not.  This probably wasn't incredibly necessary since I was only using two fabrics but it made me feel better anyway. Then I laid all my rows out next to each other, pretty much recreating the look of the quilt again.

5. Once all the rows were sewn, I ironed down the seems.  Odd rows (1, 3, 5, etc) were ironed to one side while the even rows (2, 4, 6, etc) were ironed to the other side. (For some reason, I don't have a picture of this step but the tutorial mentioned above does.)

6. After the seems of each row were finished I began sewing each row together by first pinning rows 1 and 2 together while right fabrics were facing each other.  I sewed with a 1/4 inch seem.

(This is where steps for adding a border would have gone if I had done it.)

7. When all rows were sewn together creating the entire front of the quilt, I ironed the back again to try to get the seems under control.

8. Next I ironed the fabric for the back of the quilt and laid it face down as flat as I could.  Then I placed my batting on top followed by the front of my quilt face up.

9. I didn't have any fancy quilting pins or anything so I just pinned all three layers of the quilt together with the regular sewing pins I had laying around.

10. The tutorial said to sew the three layers together starting in the middle, so that is exactly what I did.  I found a spot near the very center of the quilt then started sewing from there to the outside of the quilt.  Then I went back to that spot where I started and sewed the other direction to the outside of the quilt.  From there I worked my way out sewing all my rows and columns until each seem line on the front of the quilt had been sewn over (or close to each seem, the quilt certainly isn't perfect).

11. When all the actual "quilting" was done, I laid the quilt out flat and trimmed any extra fabric off.  This is where I learned that my squares on the front didn't end up being the exact right side for my backing but it was now too late to worry about that.

12. Now it was time to worry about the binding, the part I dreaded the most.  I cut out three 2 1/2 inch wide strips of the black fabric.  The strips were long enough to go all the way around the outside edge of the quilt plus just a little to make sure there was enough.

13. Next I sewed each of the three strips together at the 2 1/2 inch sides, creating a really long 2 1/2 inch wide strip of fabric.

14. I ironed the seems down then folded the strip in half and ironed to keep the fold in place.

15. I placed the right side raw edges of strip down facing the right side raw edges of the middle of an edge of the back of the quilt and began pinning until I got to a corner.  Once at the corner I folded the strip over on itself to create a 45 degree angle; I pinned the fabric here.  Then I laid the strip fabric down on the next edge of the backing.  At the corner, this created a triangle of extra fabric (please see my pictures and/or the pictures on the tutorial mentioned above if this isn't making sense) which I pinned so the extra fabric stood up by putting a second pin at a 45 degree angle on the other side of the extra fabric.  I followed all these steps until the end of my strip met up with the beginning of my strip.

16. Then I sewed the strip for the binding to the quilt.  When I got to the first angled pin (and I mean right up to it), I removed the pin, folded the triangle down toward where I had just sewn, removed the second pin, turned the quilt so I'd be sewing down the next edge and sewed down the next edge.

At this point the tutorial said something about sewing the beginning and the end of the strip together but I didn't get it so I didn't do it.

17.  Once the whole binding strip was sewn to the back of the quilt I turned over the extra fabric from the strip to the front of the quilt and pinned it down.  Since the raw edges of the strip were sewn to the raw edge of the backing, the edge of the strip that is now on the front of the quilt is a folded edge.

18. Finally I sewed the binding onto the front of the quilt.

Done.

From the pictures you can see that my backing has a kind of interesting pattern.  If I were to start this whole project over again I would have made the black and white fabric the front of the quilt, used solid black for the back of the quilt and the binding, and used the green fabric as a border.  Then, instead of quilting straight lines, I would have followed the lines of the black and white pattern when sewing all three layers together.  Oh well, I guess learning things is what a first quilt is all about.