Abundance Quilt, FINISHED!

OK! I'm finally finished with my first quilt ever! It took me a month, but then again, I was working within the guidance of a class, so I sort of had to go slow!

I'm linking this post to the Blogger's Quilt Festival over at Amy's Creative Side. When you enter a quilt into the Quilt Festival, you're supposed to tell as story about the quilt, why it's special, what you learned from it, etc.

This quilt doesn't have much of a story (it's all new fabric and nothing too terribly sentimental), but it is special to me because it's my very first one! As I mentioned before, I have been interested in quilting for a long time but I always thought it would be too difficult to get into- I was so wrong! It's not difficult! Expensive? Yes, ma'am (at least for me to get started!), but difficult, no! I hope that now that I have the skills to quilt, I can finally do the project that inspired me in the first place- my great-grandmother's unused quilt tops- especially this one!

What have I learned from this quilt- EVERYTHING! One thing that I will especially make sure to do with all future quilts is to cut my strings while doing the actual quilting!

My machine has a handy "cut" button that snips my threads while the material is still on the machine, which is wonderful, but it also leaves 1" strings all over the quilt. Which means I end up having to do this to see the whole quilt and snip all those teensy threads:NOT fun.

Super-tedious.

However, I did end up with an awesome (and HUGE, by the way!) quilt that I LOVE! It's 90 degrees out today, but I still want to snuggle up with it- is that weird?

The back is a cream Kona solid:

and here it is all folded up- beautiful!
What do you think?