Guest Room: Done

As I said in my last post my in-laws are coming for a visit. I have one full weekend left to prepare for their arrival, but as of right now they could show up tomorrow and I would feel okay. I am super excited for them to get here; even more so now that the guest room actually resembles something habitable. After years of tiny apartments, I'm kind of blown away that I even have a guest room. Last night I finally finished the quilt for the bed, today I made curtains, and my super wonderful husband hung the curtain rod for me.

The curtains were totally easy. I got a three yard piece of fabric, cut it in half, did a narrow hem on one end, folded over the selvedges and then made a channel for the curtain rod at the top. Easy Peasy. I wanted to visually elongate the window by hanging the curtain higher and having it trail down further, but the cut table girl mis-measured. Oh well. She only charged for three and the window is still fully covered.I don't know if you can really tell in the picture (it's super hard to photograph curtains, what with them being in front of windows and all) but the curtains have a white on white pattern to them. So do all of the white fabrics used in the quilt, although the curtains were not one of those fabrics.

Incidentally, the quilt has 36 different fabrics. I had way too much fun picking out fat quarters. It's a basic nine patch pattern, alternating orange/white and blue/white blocks. I really love the chain pattern that it created.

It took ages to lay everything out because I was trying to avoid any repeat fabric combos. None of my 36 squares are the same. Finished, it's a queen size quilt, but laying it out took up a lot more space then the finished quilt. I didn't have a space in my house large enough to actually lay it all out at once.

I was totally and completely thrilled with the pieced top, however, I started loosing steam when I got to the actually quilting. I did learn a lot though. For example, I learned that I hate polyester batting. Cotton is, for lack of a better word "sticky" so all my previous quilts basically stayed where I put them and pin basting was totally enough.

I wanted to try poly batting because it doesn't make for such a stiff finished quilt. Never. Again. Everything shifted and bunched like crazy. The back of my quilt is horrifically ugly. I actually had to piece on extra backing because my back shifted so much I ended up with a naked edge.

In the end, the top of the quilt looks alright, so I'm happy enough with it, and my mother in law is much too polite to say anything about how ugly the back is. But yeah, totally not a polyester fan. The backing fabric was a poly cotton blend and it was noticeably harder to stitch though for the binding too. I had to break out my thimble and everything. Not my favorite.

At the end of the day I think the quilt looks great, and it even looks okay with my bed skirt. You may recognize that bed skirt because it used to be in the master bed-room but Husband and I got an adjustable base for our bed. I adore my robo bed, but it doesn't work with a bed skirt.

And bonus, I hung up this wonderful sea otter cross stitch that my mom made - probably sometime in the mid-nineties because that was peak sea otter obsession for me. After that I moved onto horses. Yep, I was totally that little girl. I only recently got that cross-stitch back from Mom and I was glad I had a place that I think it looks good in. Just ignore my reflection please and thank you.