Puppy Pieces Quilt

After nearly 2 months of working on and off, I can finally say that I've finished the Puppy Pieces quilt! When I embarked on making a quilt of puppies with paper piecing, I had no idea how much work I was in for. Apparently, between cutting the paper templates, punching and perforating holes, paper piecing the 35 puppies, and appliqueing eyes and tail bows, not to mention actually quilting this, it was a ton of work! I think I burned through the first 6 Harry Potter audiobooks working on this.

I encountered a few challenges while working on this quilt, the first of which was that the tail seams didn't match up perfectly. I decided to just use a sharpie to color it in and fudge it a bit on most of them, and some of the more egregious mismatched tail seams ended up getting pink bows appliqued on. Then, quilting this turned into another little nightmare. I was having a lot of trouble pushing the quilt through, despite the ample throat space on the machine, as a lot of the challenge came from the great hunk of quilt hanging to the left of the machine, and the fact that the quilt was getting caught on my hated extension table a whole lot. How I wish I had a table that allowed flatbed sewing! Since getting new furniture isn't feasible at the moment, I finally caved and invested in Jennoop quilt suspenders and hope it will make my next quilt easier to maneuver.

But when a project is done, I hardly remember the difficulties. There's a great sense of accomplishment when the final stitches of the binding are done, which is part of the reason why I like binding quilts so much. I'm very pleased with the result, I think it's quite adorable and know that my daughter will love it.