Another finished quilt

A bit over a week ago, I picked up the most recent quilt top I had quilted at the local quilt shop. I was quite pleased. (They do a good job - and the quilting is extremely reasonable. As much as I like hand-quilted quilts, I have to admit I feel less trepidation at USING the machine-quilted ones, because I know if I spill tea on them or get them dusty I can probably launder them without risk, whereas washing a hand-quilted quilt requires special care - soaking the quilt in the bathtub, carefully transferring it to a tarp or something, finding a spot in the yard to lay it out (on a clear, dry day), and hoping the thing dries before nightfall)

And also, with a quickly-put-together, not-entirely-traditionally-patterned quilt, the machine quilting looks just fine.



Funny how it looks a lot more orderly from a distance. This is the quilt I made off the "Citrus" pattern and finished the sewing on a while back. Earlier this month, I got a backing for it (it turned out, thus, not to be an ENTIRELY from-the-stash quilt, but I couldn't find a large enough piece of anything that coordinated well, and I didn't feel like piecing the backing for this. So I used a good coupon I had at JoAnn Fabrics to get this:



I like it as the backing of the quilt - it coordinates well. (I also used the scraps leftover for the binding.)

It's funny, I wasn't sure I liked this quilt when it was done and felt sort of apologetic about it - it's kind of loud, some of the colors don't match just right - but when I picked it up from the quilt shop the woman working there laughed and said, "This almost didn't make it back to you; several of the workers said they 'wanted' this quilt." So I don't know. (Sometimes I think my judgment of what I do is a lot harsher than how other people judge it). And I do think it looks nicer all finished.



And from the "relate everything in life to a cartoon" files, I think of this as my Pinkie Pie quilt - it's kind of loud, it's kind of random, it may not totally make sense, but sometimes maybe it's just what you need. (Pinkie Pie, for all her randomness, on a couple of occasions has the very solution to whatever problem exists in Ponyville. However, since she's not good at articulating "hey guys I have the answer" they go on thinking she's an idiot....until she solves the problem.)