An oh so sweet step outside my comfort zone...

I decided this year that I wanted to make my best effort to participate in some of the Project Quilting challenges.  And, while I am pretty comfortable sewing anything in the clothing/bag/accessory realm... quilts are scary.  Yes, hush all you quilters, they scare me. 

When we were little (like 7 or 8) my Great Aunt tried to get us to quilt.  My younger cousin, who is pretty flighty, had the patience to sit there and do it, I on the other hand, got bored sewing square after square, and I wouldn't pay attention and my rows would end up all wonky.  But, many (many, many) years later, I have decided that I can do this this...

I made a quilt for my older brother's wedding, and I really enjoyed it, even though I found it insanely stressful, but I need the push to force me out of my comfort zone, so Project Quilting seemed like the perfect thing.

This week, Challenge 3, the challenge was Sweet Treats and you can read all about it here.

And, remembering, I am still in my 100 items (misery) challenge, so I shopped my stash.... and with help from Inara (as always), decided on:

GUMMY BEARS!!

I wanted to make it sort of like a nerdy pixel quilt, so I pulled up Powerpoint... and here is where you get to laugh at me...  Some very nice friends said the first one "sort of" looked like an animal:

The second one apparently looked like a fire hydrant: 

And lastly, we ended with this:

And then after some discussion, Inara choose a pink gummy bear with green and blue to go with the gummy bear fabric... so I colored it in... (and she wanted to color one too... her gummy bear as a star bow.  I'm kind of impressed with her use of Powerpoint at 5!)

In retrospect, I wish I had rounded off the tops of the feet like I did the ears and maybe extended the hands and rounded those off too.... but all in all I'm really happy with it....

So then to work... Here's progress when I had a moment of "do I REALLY need to put a border on?"

It did, I found 1/2yd of an orange that matched in my stash, and pulled that out too... I had to go buy batting, which I decided isn't cheating, because I couldn't finish without it.  But I did have a decent match for the backing:

Then I got down to pin.... and realized these were the only pins I had...

Which were slightly less than fun to work with (note to self, pick up bigger pins), and then on to the quilting... My walking foot and I aren't really on good terms, so it was a little slow going for the stitch in the ditch around the bear outline and the border:

 Am I the only paranoid one who does this every little bit?

It's really silly because my machine will beep and stop when the bobbin gets low, but I was paranoid that I'd run out in the middle of a swirl or something... After the boring straight lines did the the accents to make the bear look more like a bear, and then I hemmed and hawed a bit and decided to chance it and wrote out the quilt name "Icky Sticky Yummy Gummy" (Inara chosen) in FMQ...

<<- top left

 bottom right ->>




After that, some stitch in the ditch around the gummy bear blocks and add the binding... and TA-DA!! 

I will definitely play again for the next challenge!  Stay tuned, we've got a busy week around here!