Spring Quilt - Completed!

I brought my spring quilt on the flight down to my Grandmother's last weekend. She lives in the Bay Area, so it's a pretty short flight, but I had over an hour in the airport waiting, then an hour and a half on the plane, then I finished the binding that evening.

Granny greatly admired the quilt, so I left it with her. It's got a somewhat thicker batting in it than the first quilt I made for her, and it's a little bigger. It's nice for her to keep on her bed or to nap on the couch with. The other one works as a lap quilt for when she's sitting in her rocking chair watching TV.

I forgot to take pictures of it before I left, so my mother took some for me. Here's what I ended up with for the quilting. You can see the pattern pretty well on the purple block. All the solid blocks are quilted with the same overlapping heart pattern. You can't see the quilting at all on the patterned areas.

I had to wash it twice to get the marks out from the fabric marker I used used to trace the quilting patterns. I used a blue washable marker (which came out very well, but which didn't last for the whole quilt and kept drying out) and a green mechanical chalk pencil (which was the one that didn't wash out easily). The washable marker marked well and came out easily, but I could do about one block's worth of pattern before I had to stop and turn it upside down to rest for a while and get the ink flowing again. The mechanical pencil was harder to mark with and didn't come out as well, but also lasted much longer. I need to try other marking utensils because I'm not all that happy with either of these.

It's backed with part of a sheet that I bought at Goodwill. The binding is short pieces from the same jelly roll as the patterned fabric - four different colors of the same print.

It's about 45" wide and 65" long.

Construction details:

Piecing thread: Gutterman 100% cotton in a cream or light beige color.

Piecing needle: size 75 quilting needle (now my standard - I love these needles).

Batting: probably warm&white cotton - I used two left-over sections of batting from other projects. I think they were both the same kind, but I'm not 100% sure

Quilting needle: same.

Quilting thread: same.

Tension: increased to about 6.