The Last and the First...

While the title of this post sounds like some profound novel in progress, I have my last finish of 2014 to share with you.  But what I'm most proud of is that it's also my daughter Sophie's first quilt finish - ever.  She is 6 and has been watching me sew for her entire life.  She's pretty crafty herself but the furthest we've gotten as far as sewing is her sitting at my sewing machine, practicing sewing straight lines onto paper.  But last week,  I got on a potholder kick due to a gorgeous post by Ashley at Film in the Fridge.  More on this next week, I promise! 

Inspired by the idea of scrappy rainbows, I had ALL of my color coded bags of scraps out and scattered across the floor in my tiny sewing corner.  Sophie sees all the fabric and asks if she can sew too - usually this just amounts to her taking her ragged safety scissors and ravaging the life out of fabric scraps.  Sure, I say...and if I'm being completely honest, I was only half listening and trying to stay in the zone.  Maybe a minute later, she asks if I can sew these two pieces of white fabric together.  Yeah, yeah, here you go....I mumble.  I zip it through my machine and back into the zone I go.

Five minutes go by and suddenly - in typical mom fashion - I realize that things are quiet.  Too quiet.  I turn around and see this:

I feel instantly proud - here she is armed with only scraps and a glue stick, making this adorable rainbow "quilt".  But also, in that flash of proudness, I felt that awful flash of mom guilt.  I was wrapped up in my own project, single-minded and focused...and this was happening literally a foot behind me.  And I was missing it.

Needless to say that the potholders were set aside and we finished the rainbow together.  It took all my self control not to trim here or smooth a rough and jagged edge there.  She was happy with how it looked and it was HER quilt.  Perfection be damned.  It looks perfect to her, so who am I to argue?

When all the gluing was done, we ran it under the iron to set things up a little firmer and I asked if she wanted me to quilt it all down.  If this was practice for her, it was going to be practice for me too!  I decided to practice a different technique in each color band - matchstick quilting in the pink center, pebbles in the purple, crosshatching in blue, meander (I stink, STINK at this supposedly easy style!) in green, ribbon candy in yellow, chain squares in orange, and a regular curvy back and forth in red.

Even though the backing is really dark and busy, I love how the rainbow quilting looks on the back :)

I did a very tight grid in the white background and a free motion sunburst in the block of sunshine.

Sophie says that she wants to use it as a doll blanket, but I added a couple pockets on the back just in case she decides to hang it on the wall instead.

My favorite part of this whole thing is that it was pinned up on my corkboard while I was deciding how to quilt it and Sophie wandered up behind me and put her little (okay, not so little anymore) arm around my waist.  "Mummy," she says.  "It's so beautiful that it makes me want to cry!"

Me too, honey.  Me too.