quilt progress?

when last (and first) i mentioned it, the quilt i am making for layla was just 5 separate blocks. very shortly after that (because making and attaching blocks was actually way more fun than i expected), it was a 4x4 block quilt top:

love and love and love it!

seems like i was almost done, right? ugh. no. you have to actually quilt it now. this means putting the padding in between my top above and a backing fabric and attaching it all together by running stitches all over the place. there are hundreds of books and blogs devoted to this portion of making a quilt that i wanted to so cavalierly overlook. apparently all i had done was the easy and fun part. now was the trial by fire.

i failed. i failed so hard, yall.

this is actually technically a quilt. there is padding sandwiched between backing fabric and my pretty top. all it technically needs is binding trim all around the edges.

oh but it's so bad you guys. i have not the patience for the diligent and perfectionist pinning that assembling a quilt requires. after an hour of crab walking all over this thing taped to my kitchen floor i was starting to wonder how grannies turn these mothers out without keeling over. so i sort of rushed it so i could just move to the next phase and start sewing it all together (classic me). since my top and bottom layers weren't evenly smoothed and pinned as such i got nasty gathering and bunching (even my walking foot couldn't save me).

sick!

no ma'am!

and let's flip over to the back. i adore the fabric i picked and think it's just right for layla because it's pink yet has lots of the slate color to de-girly it a tad and it has flowers but also plain tiny dots in beige.

if you stand this far away it's not atrocious

some of my quilting line junctions are even nice-looking

but then you spot things like this:

oh, the shame. there was much gnashing of teeth and tearing of tunics when i saw this. i could have maybe overlooked the front bunching because of all the colors and patterns distracting from it. but like gandalf told the balrog, i must tell this epic nastiness: "YOU SHALL NOT PASS!"

so this is my best buddy for the next few nights:

ye olde seam ripper. good thing i know myself enough to have bought the full-sized ripper for extra-dumb sewers. and a sarcastic goodie good that i triple quilted this thing....3 times the fun!!! at least my burn is healing nicely.