Night Owl

Remember when I said that I was going to work on giving Jackson's old nursery a new life for the new baby? Well, I took a big step in that direction this past week. I've been busy in my sweat shop craft room making the baby a quilt. I wanted to find a retro owl print fabric that would compliment this owl picture I found on etsy, but couldn't find anything that I liked. So, I made it myself. I found coordinating fabrics to make the quilt and got some buttons and corduroy and got busy making owl squares. I used the original owl print above as my template and cut out several little owls out of the corduroy. I wanted each owl to be unique, so I made all of the bellies different fabrics (that I'd use for the quilt) and different button combinations for the eyes. They are definitely all different....some of them so different it's hard to tell it's an owl and not a Cheshire Cat. (cough, cough...I'm looking at you, bottom left owl....) But I decided to use all of the owls, regardless of how owley they looked. After the long process of making the nine owl squares, I got busy on the rest of the quilt. This was the first time I had used certain quilting techniques so there is always a bit of a learning process associated with that. Making the actual quilted squares wasn't too difficult, and I've done that part before, so no big deal. Then I got to the part where I had to use a new accessory on my machine. A walking foot. I installed it according to the directions on the box, and even put on a new needle for good measure. I got out my scrap quilt sandwich and gave it a shot. I'd get about a half inch in and my thread would break. Every. Single. Time. I rethreaded the machine. I rethreaded the bobbin. I changed the tension. I changed out the walking foot for my regular foot. I tried everything. No matter what I did, the thread kept breaking. The only thing I could think of was that my machine somehow broke in the process of changing the foot and I'd have to take it in to the repair shop. But somewhere between asking google about thread snapping and me throwing the machine out of our second story window, the thought crossed my mind that I changed the needle too. Could that be the problem? After further examination, I saw that I had, in fact, put the needle in backwards. Seriously?! The effing needle was in backwards?! What a rookie mistake! Well, that took care of that and I was all ready to roll again. I tried my hand at "stitching the ditch" to quilt the back to the front, and was rather successful. I was feeling pretty confident with the way everything was looking and all I had to do was attach the satin binding around the outside. Let me just say that attaching a satin binding to a silky minky fabric was more difficult that I thought. I ended up having to pin it every inch or so, but I finally got it. I'm pretty pleased with the way it turned out. And any imperfections will be chalked up to "made with love".