Wow, I actually finished one of my projects.

Lookie what I made!

Why yes, that is a quilt! It’s something I’ve been working on for about a year.

What you see in front of you actually started out as the back for a different quilt. When I was done making the back, I realized that I liked it a lot more than the original quilt, and started on a new project with a better quilt top.

I’ve “made” other quilts before. What I mean is that in the past, I have made a quilt top, put it in a plastic bag, delivered it to my quilting mother, and maybe a month or two later, a blanket would appear that looked vaguely like the thing I’d started with, but a billion times cooler and more useful. This time around I did everything.

Which is why this quilt is tied. I don’t really have the time or patience to actually quilt. Sewing a sandwich together for months on end seems like something I wouldn’t thrive at. I almost had a little meltdown when Mom told me I had to hand stitch the binding. (Binding is the border around the outside that glues it all together in one pretty little package.)

One of the nice things about the tying and hand stitching process was that it involved many hours of standing in front of a television. I watched all of the first season of Downton Abbey and most of Misfits which doing the hand tying. The hand stitching was mostly done while watching Archer.

Another nice thing for me about having a quilting project is that I spend my days moving form fields around on a computer screen; making something more blue; or possibly inserting, updating or selecting data from a database. When I go home at night, I can’t really pick anything up and say “This is what I did today”. I guess I could put the subversion repository on a USB stick, but it’s not the same thing. This thing takes up physical space. You can pick it up, throw it across the room, wrap yourself up in it, pretend you’re a quilt monster. Read books under it. That’s kind of cool. I can’t do that with my medical billing software. No matter how cool that database query was.

Now I just need to figure out what to do with it. I don’t really need another quilt, and I probably shouldn’t start on another project until this one is out the door. Bonus points to those of you who stopped to look at what books were on our bedside tables.